2018-2019 annual report · 2019-11-26 · with research and teaching that offer innovative pathways...

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Year in ReviewWe live in troubling times. The country feels like it is being ripped apart by partisan rancor, by deepening wealth inequality and a resurgence of racism. Hatred and fear fill the air, and the ideas of hope and change seem a distant memory. Of all the challenges that confront the United States, none is more profound than the struggle to achieve racial equality and to understand the impact of race on the life and institutions of the United States. To put it bluntly, race matters have shadowed, and continue to shadow, American democracy.

The Department of African American Studies at Princeton University stands as an important place to think carefully about the problems we currently confront as a nation. With an intimate understanding of the complex histories that shape the American project, we are pushing disciplinary boundaries with research and teaching that offer innovative pathways for thinking clearly about a more just society. We are training a new generation of leaders to solve problems that have persisted too long, both in this country and around the globe.

Last year, the Department graduated our first class of concentrators. It was a historic day for Princeton. Ten brilliant students walked through Fitz-Randolph Gates with degrees in African American Studies. They were joined by eighteen graduating seniors who completed our certificate program. These were our pioneers.

This year, we graduated our second class, and the cohort was particularly strong. Micah Herskind graduated with highest honors and was the recipient of the Ruth J. Simmons Thesis

Prize. He will attend Harvard Law School next year. Sadie Van Vranken was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with highest honors. Cierra Robson graduated with high honors and will attend graduate school in sociology and social policy at Harvard University next year. Our concentrators were joined by ten graduating seniors who completed a certificate in African American Studies, and two Ph.D. students who earned graduate certificates in African American Studies.

The strength of this group reflects not only the excellence and drive of the students, but the commitment of our faculty to teaching. Our hope is to provide an educational experience that is, at once, intimate and intense. We are seeing the results. One thousand and eighty-one students enrolled in our classes last year, representing a 24.7% increase in enrollment. Next year, the department will have eleven graduating concentrators, and at Princeton Preview, over 30

Letter from the Chair

Courtesy of Office of Communications

Year in Review prospective students sat in the Hobson-Rogers seminar room. They came because they were interested in concentrating in African American Studies at Princeton! This too was a historic moment. We now have our largest class yet, as thirteen sophomores declared African American Studies as their concentration.

Our faculty are amazing in the classroom and continue to amaze me with their productivity. Several new books are scheduled for publication in 2019-2020. Ruha Benjamin’s new books Race

After Technology: Abolitionist Tools and The New Jim Code and Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Transcendence and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life have already hit the stands and are making an impact. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s new book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (available in October) has already created a buzz. Imani Perry’s fourth book in a little over year, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, will be available in September. And this is just a brief sample of the work in the unit.

We continue to offer a wide range of programming throughout the year: for example, an Author Meets Critic event with Joshua Guild and Albert Woodfox, a

member of the Black Panther Party who spent over forty years in solitary confinement, and our Sports, Race, and Society Lecture Series (co-sponsored with the Athletics department) featured NFL player, Michael Bennett (author of Things That Make White People Uncomfortable). We also sponsored several professional development programs for graduate students.

In the end, 2018-2019 was another exciting year for the Department of African American Studies. After reading this report, I hope you agree. Our students continue to amaze. Our faculty and staff continue to be guiding lights, not only at Princeton but for the nation. Fifty years in the making! Today, we are known as the best department in the country, and your support has helped make this a reality.

“In the Nation’s Service and In the Service of Humanity”

Sincerely,

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. Chair, Department of African American StudiesJames S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor

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Table of ContentsAbout the DepartmentOverview Page 3

Our Staff Page 4

Advisory Council Page 5

Undergraduate Board of Advisors

AAS Academic Committees Page 7

2018-2019 Podcast Episodes Page 9

Academic Courses Page 13-16

Fall 2018 Courses Page 13

Spring 2019 Courses Page 15

AAS Undergraduate StudiesOverview Page 19

Course of Study & Subfields Page 20

Undergraduate Certificate Requirements Page 22

Undergraduate Certificate Students Page 23

Concentration Overview and Requirements Page 27

2019 Concentrators Page 29

2019 Senior Prizes & Winners Page 37

Reflection: Cierra Robson ’19 Page 39

Study Abroad Opportunities Page 41

Undergraduate Funding Opportunities Page 42

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AAS Graduate StudiesOverview Page 43

2018-2019 Faculty-Graduate Seminar Page 45

2019 Graduate Certificate Recipients Page 47

Reflection: Heath Pearson, Ph.D. Page 49

Programming & Highlights

Overview Page 51

Fall 2018 Events Page 52

Spring 2019 Events Page 57

Class Day & Commencement Page 61

AAS Faculty

Core Faculty Page 63

Awards & Achievements 3

Associated Faculty Page 77

Faculty Emeritus Page 79

Fellows & Visiting Faculty Page 80

Publications & Articles

When Slaveowners Got Reparations Page 80

Donald Goines and the Birth 0f Black Pulp Fiction Page 84

Notes From The Field: Following The Routes Of U.S. Deportation Through History Page 89

Priests, Scholars gather to celebrate Princeton’s Ethiopian manuscripts Page 91

New Directions in Caribbean History Page 93

Imani Perry’s Liberation Feminism Page 100

El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale Page 103

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About African American Studies

This academic unit has grown from a program to a center, to a department. Today the department holds many of the most prolific and notable African American Studies scholars in the world.

The Department of African American Studies at Princeton University provides an exciting and innovative model for teaching and research about African-descended people, with a central focus on their experiences in the United States. We embody this mission in a curriculum that reflects the complex interplay between the political, economic, and cultural forces that shape our understanding of the historic achievements and struggles of African-descended people in this country and around the world.

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Front entry way of Stanhope Hall on a sunny Fall day.Photo by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy

Our StaffAnthony Gibbons Jr., Communications & Media Specialist

Jana Johnson, Department Assistant

Elio Lleo, Technical Support Specialist

April Peters, Manager, Finance & Administration

Dionne Worthy, Assistant to the Chair and Events Coordinator

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Advisory CouncilThe Advisory Council is an external panel of experts which guides the department in the growth and expansion of its mission.

DonnaBeverlyFord‘82 Chair, Hillsides

La Cañada Flintridge, California

BrentHenry‘69 Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky & Popeo, P.C, Partners HealthCare System

Boston, Massachusetts

WilliamB.KingJr.‘67 DirectorCorps, Inc.

Nashville, Tennessee

HenryVonKohorn‘66 Founder, The Princeton Prize in Race Relations

Princeton, New Jersey

Claudia Mitchell-Kernan Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences

Parent of ‘94 and ‘98

Los Angeles, California

Wes MooreChiefExecutiveOfficer,RobinHood

New York, New York

LaurenceMorse‘80 Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Fairview Capital Partners

West Hartford, Connecticut

Ruth J. Simmons President, Prairie View A&M University

Providence, Rhode Island

Honorary Board Member

About African American Studies 6

Undergraduate Board of AdvisorsThe Undergraduate Board of Advisors acts as the voice for students in the department and plans many events each year.

Tamia GoodmanClass of 2019

Cierra RobsonClass of 2019

Nathan PolandClass of 2020

Masha MiuraClass of 2021

Ashley HodgesClass of 2021

Irene RossClass of 2020

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Priorities CommitteeThe priorities committee is the executive committee for AAS and is chaired by the department chair. It is tasked with reviewing the yearly budgets proposed by the chair, and with crafting the policies, procedures and guidelines governing faculty roles, expectations and responsibilities. Policies, issues and concerns relating to the process governing tenure and promotion originate with this committee, as well as decisions representing significant changes in the organization, direction, or functioning of the department. The priorities committee is also responsible for selecting postdoctoral and distinguished visiting fellows each year, and for proposing names of faculty to deliver the Morrison and Baldwin lectures.

Programming CommitteeThe department chair appoints the chair of the programming committee for a two-year term. Following committee guidelines, the programming committee responds to requests and allocates funds for co-sponsorship funding from student groups, faculty, and departments. They allocate a yearly budget and refer to department guidelines for the rules governing funds allocation. They are also responsible for proposing to the chair yearly programming that would support the vision, mission, and growth of AAS.

2018-2019 Members• Ruha Benjamin

• Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

• Joshua B. Guild

• Naomi Murakawa

2018-2019 Members• Wallace D. Best

• Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

• Reena N. Goldthree

• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

AAS Academic Committees


Curriculum CommitteeThe director of undergraduate studies (DUS) chairs the curriculum committee. The department chair, in consultation with the DUS, chooses committee members. In the absence of a DUS, the department chair will chair the committee. The curriculum committee is tasked with the oversight of issues, concerns, policies and procedures relating to the concentration and/or certificate in African American Studies. This committee has administrative responsibility for review of faculty course relief requests, and for responding to requests from faculty regarding changes in individual teaching loads. In addition, the curriculum committee reviews requests from faculty to teach new courses, reviews and signs off on hiring visiting faculty and lecturers, assigns courses to incoming fellows, and reviews semester-to-semester coverage of required courses for the concentration and certificate. Finally, this committee is responsible for allocating funding requests for course support, senior thesis and dissertation funding, and conference travel for undergraduate and graduate students. Committee appointments are for a two-year period.

2018-2019 Members• Joshua B. Guild

• Naomi Murakawa

• Chika O. Okeke-Agulu

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2018-2019 Podcast Episodes

The AAS21 Podcast is a conversation around books and ideas animating the field of African American Studies with a focus on the political, economic, and cultural forces that shape our understanding of race and racial groups in the 21st century.

We invite you to listen as we “read” how race and culture are produced globally – looking past outcomes to beginnings, questioning dominant discourses, and considering evidence instead of myth. This podcast is recorded and produced by AAS staff at Princeton University


A behind-the-scenes look, with Prof. Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Prof. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., during a podcast recording session.

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Episode #13

BlackPulpFiction’sUncannyOriginsTuesday, July 10, 2018

In this episode of the AAS 21 Podcast, Professor Kinohi Nishikawa comes to the table with Professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. to discuss black pulp fiction, taking seriously “lower” forms of literature in the college classroom and beyond. Nishikawa’s book, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground was released (University of Chicago Press, 2018). In particular, the book traces the many titles published by Holloway House from the late 1960’s to the imprint’s close in 2008. This fascinating discussion is a deep dive into questions about genre, different communities of readers, and how modern literature, and its handling of complex topics, touches other art forms.

Episode #14

InspiringChangeinTrump’sAmericaTuesday, January 29, 2019

As we step into 2019, Professors Eddie Glaude and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor discuss and review the political climate of America. Professor Taylor points out the importance of continuing to organize and mobilize social activism, like Black Lives Matter, with the understanding that a single objective is more significant than the different political views. Dr. Glaude highlights the deep fear and “Shock and Awe” around President Trump’s current administration and policies. Professor Taylor warns of the dangers of moving forward as a nation with an “anything but Trump” perspective; how it lowers the expectations for parties and continues to perpetuate similar issues.


Episode #15

TheInfluenceofAncientEthiopiaTuesday, March 12, 2019

In this episode, Eddie Glaude sits down with Professor Wendy Belcher to discuss her recent book. Professor Belcher reveals her connection to Ethiopia, and how her life experiences of growing up white in Africa seep through her perspective and understanding. Professor Belcher explains how her curiosity early in life pushed her to research, archive, and translate ancient Ethiopian texts; becoming the foundation of her recent book, The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman.

Episode#16

Black Bodies,White GoldTuesday, April 30, 2019

In this episode, Professor Eddie Glaude discusses with Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson her application of research on textiles, music, and photography for her upcoming work Black Bodies White Gold. Professor Arabindan-Kesson, an Art Historian at heart, reveals the history and connections of blacks and cotton and their turbulent history across America and Europe. Not only does she examine the ways enslaved people and cotton were commodities in the eyes of the law, she also explores how it physically framed the way a slave looked, and in turn felt. Ultimately with this research, her goal is to examine how this history complicates what it means to be free and black in today’s world.


AAS 201 Introduction to the Study of African American Cultural Practices

Naomi Murakawa

AAS 230 ENG 231

Topics in African American Studies: The Fire This Time - Reading James Baldwin

Eddie S. Glaude

AAS 245 ART 245

Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movements

Chika O. Okeke-Agulu

AAS 300 Junior Seminar: Research and Writing in African American Studies

Joshua B. Guild, Naomi Murakawa

AAS 305REL 391 MUS 354 AMS 355

The History of Black Gospel Music

Wallace D. Best

AAS 322 LAS 301 LAO 322AMS 323

Afro-Diasporic Dialogues: Black Activism in Latin America and the United States

Reena N. Goldthree

AAS 328 LAS 352

Slavery and Emancipation in Latin America and the Caribbean

Reena N. Goldthree

AAS 353 ENG 352

African American Literature: Origins to 1910

Autumn M. Womack

AAS362WWS386POL 338

Race and the American Legal Process: Emancipation to the Voting Rights Act

Imani Perry

AAS363ENG 439 AMS362

Blackness and MediaAutumn M. Womack

Academic Courses

Fall 2018 Courses


AAS367HIS387

African American History Since Emancipation

Joshua B. Guild

AAS 380

AMS 382Public Policy in the U.S. Racial State

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

AAS 442 AFS 442 COM 425

Radical African Thought and Revolutionary Youth Culture

Wendy L. Belcher

AAS 499 ENG 499 AMS 499

Theoretical Approaches in Black Studies

Nijah Cunningham

ART473AAS473AFS473

Kongo ArtChika O. Okeke-Agulu

DAN 211 AAS 211

The American Dance Experience and Africanist Dance Practices

Dyane Harvey Salaam

DAN 223 AAS 223 VIS 224

An Introduction to the Radical Imagination

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

GSS 345 AAS 355 AMS373

Pleasure, Power and Profit: Race and Sexualities in a Global Era

Anne McClintock

GSS 502 AAS 502 POL 514

Gender and Sexuality in American Politics and Policy

Dara Z. Strolovitch

HIS 485AAS 409

History of African American FamiliesTera W. Hunter

HIS 492AFS 492 AAS 492

Utopias of Yesteryear: Socialist Experiments in Africa

Benedito L. Machava

HIS577AAS577

Readings in African American History

Tera W. Hunter

NES 395 AFS 412 AAS 412 HIS457

Human Trafficking and its Demise: African and European Slaves in Modern Islam (16th-21st century)

M’hamedOualdi

WWS 345 PSY 384 AAS 384

Prejudice: Its Causes, Consequences, and Cures

Stacey A. Sinclair

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Spring 2019 Courses

AAS 235 SOC236

Race is Socially Constructed: Now What?

Ruha Benjamin

AAS 302 SOC 303 ANT378GHP 302

Political Bodies: The Social Anatomy of Power and Difference

Ruha Benjamin

AAS 303 Topics in Global Race and Ethnicity:

From Haiti to Ferguson: The Global Black Freedom Struggle

Jessica Ann Levy

AAS 304 HUM 303GSS 325

History of Black CaptivityDannelle Gutarra Cordero

AAS306AMS 305

Topics in Race and Public Policy:

Radical Subjects - Race and Deportation

Olivia Mena

AAS 313 LAS377HIS 213

Modern Caribbean HistoryReena N. Goldthree

AAS 318REL 318GSS375

Black Women & Spiritual NarrativeWallace D. Best

AAS 319 LAS368GSS356

Caribbean Women’s HistoryReena N. Goldthree

AAS 351 GSS 351

Law, Social Policy, and African American Women

Imani Perry

AAS 359 ENG366

African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance to Present

Cassandra Jackson

AAS366HIS386

African American History to 1863Tera W. Hunter

AAS372ART374AMS372

Postblack: Contemporary African American Art


AAS 404 GSS 419 POL 429

Intersectional Activisms and Movements for Social Justice

Dara Strolovitch

AAS 500 African American Intellectual Tradition

Eddie Glaude, Joshua B. Guild


AAS 522 COM 522ENG 504

Publishing Articles in Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Wendy L. Belcher

AAS 555 Toni Morrison: Texts and ContextsImani Perry

AMS 315MTD 315THR 344AAS 309

Race and the American Musical from Minstrelsy to Hamilton

Stacy E. Wolf

AMS 334 AAS 335

Decolonizing America: A Seminar in Black Worldmaking

Brittney C. Cooper

ANT 223 AMS 223AAS 224URB 224

Policing and Militarization Today Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús

Laurence Ralph

ANT 389AMS 339AAS 333

Religion and Culture: Muslims in America

Aly Kassam-Remtulla

ANT461AAS364GHP461GSS461

Disability, Difference, and Race Laurence Ralph

DAN 211AAS 211

The American Dance Experience and Africanist Dance Practices

Dyane Harvey Salaam

DAN 222AAS 222

Introduction to Hip-Hop Dance Joseph Schloss

DAN 323AAS 308 LAO 323

The Politics of Hip-Hop Dance Joseph Schloss

DAN 350 AAS 329 CWR 350

Creating Your Biomythography Workshop

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

ENG 411AAS 413

Major Author(s): Mourning America: Emerson and Douglass

Eduardo L. Cadava

ENG 414 AAS 455

Major Author(s): Toni Morrison and the Ethics of Reading

Autumn M. Womack

FRE376AAS378

Haiti: History, Literature, and Arts of the First Black Republic

F. Nick Nesbitt

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LAS 313 LAO 313 AAS 331

Locked Up in the Americas: A History of Prisons and Detainment

Ryan C. Edwards

MUS262AAS262

Jazz History: Many Sounds, Many Voices

Matthew D. Clayton, Sarah Town

POL 492HUM 492AAS 491AMS 492

The Politics of Race and Credit in America

Stefan Eich

POL 543GSS 543AAS 543

Interest Groups and Social Movements in American Politics and Policy

Dara Z. Strolovitch

SPA377AAS374AMS377GSS372

Transnational Feminisms Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús

SPA556AAS 554

Slavery, Anti-Slavery, and Post-Slavery in the Iberian Atlantic

Rachel L. Price

WWS 331 SOC 312AAS317

Race and Public Policy Douglas S. Massey

“An artist must be free to choose what he does certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.”

— Langston Hughes

Outside Stanhope Hall days before AAS Alumni Mix & Mingle event.


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Undergraduate Studies in AAS

The Department of African American Studies offers both an Undergraduate Concentration and an Undergraduate Certificate that expand and deepen a students understanding of race in the United States and in the world. Students who pursue and fulfill all requirements for the Concentration are awarded a Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies. Alternatively, the Certificate in African American Studies is equivalent to an academic ‘minor’ in African American Studies. Undergraduate students in both tracks select from the same course offerings.

The Curriculum requirements in the Undergraduate Program in African American Studies reflect the complex interplay between political, economic, and cultural forces that shape our understanding of the historic achievements and struggles of African-descended people in this country and their relation to others around the world. The Course of Study is directed in three distinct subfields; African American Culture and Life; Race and Public Policy; and Global Race and Ethnicity. In addition to offering a Concentration and Certificate program for its home students, the department organizes a Junior Research Seminar, a Senior Thesis Colloquium, African American Studies Study Abroad opportunities, as well as an array of courses, public events, and lecture series open to all students.

Undergraduate Studies in AAS 20

CourseofStudy&SubfieldsAfrican American Culture and Life (AACL)In this track, students encounter the theoretical canon and keywords, which shape the contemporary discipline of African American Studies. Accessing a range of interdisciplinary areas, situated primarily in the United States, students learn to take a critical posture in examining the patterns and practices that order and transform black subjects and black life.

Race and Public Policy (RPP)In the Race and Public Policy subfield students use and interrogate social science methodologies in examining the condition of the American state and American institutions and practices. With an analysis of race and ethnicity at the center, students examine the development of institutions and practices, with the growth and formation of racial and ethnic identities, including changing perceptions, measures, and reproduction of inequality.

Global Race and Ethnicity (GRE)In the Global Race and Ethnicity subfield, students use the prevailing analytical tools and critical perspectives of African American Studies to consider comparative approaches to groups, broadly defined. Students examine the intellectual traditions, socio-political contexts, expressive forms, and modes of belonging of people who are understood to share common boundaries/experiences as either:

1. Africans and the African Diaspora outside of the United States and/or 2. Non-African descended people of color within the United States.


Prof. Naomi Murakawa speaks to students during a Sophmore Open House.Photo by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy


Undergraduate Certificate RequirementsUndergraduates who opt to pursue a certificate in African American Studies (AAS) gain access to an extraordinary bibliography that prepares them to think about difference in sophisticated ways.

Earning a Certificate in African American StudiesStudents must complete two AAS core survey courses from the list below:

• AAS 245 Introduction to 20th Century African American Art• AAS 353 African American Literature: Origins to 1910• AAS 359 African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance to Present• AAS 366 African American History to 1863• AAS 367 African American History Since Emancipation

Students must take three additional elective courses in AAS, Cross-Listed by AAS, or from our approved cognates list, and at least one of these must be in the Global Race and Ethnicity sub-field.

Additionally, students are encouraged to make African Americans and/or African American Studies central to their senior thesis topic.


JessicaP.Bailey’19SENIOR THESIS

The Aging Problem: Elderly Adjustment to Assisted LivingAdvised by Sanyu Mojola

This thesis attempts to critically look at assisted living facilities and how elderly people adjust to them by assessing the ways different parts of the elders’ institutional life affect the continuity of their life course as well as their ability to autonomously make and carry out decisions that could support this continuity. After interviewing residents, family members, and staff of an assisted living facility in New Jersey, I conclude that the decision making process seems to be the point that can make or break adjustment to a facility. If elders are unable to make the decision as autonomously as possible or find their life course continuity ruptured beyond immediate repair, they will have a harder time adjusting to the facility. While family involvement is an important determinant for adjustment, an involved family seemed to mean more for overall life satisfaction than it did for facility adjustment. Assisted living facilities can remedy some of the damage done before residents arrive by supporting them through social programming.

JamesA.Boyd‘19SENIOR THESIS

Augustine’s Confessions: An Open Letter to GodAdvised by Yelena Baraz

An evaluation of confession’s role as a public expression of love that brings a person and community closer to God.

MarciaG.Brown‘19SENIOR THESIS

Faith without works is dead: Slavery, Immediatism, and Christianity in the BorderlandAdvised by Dirk Hartog

This thesis explores the relationship between Christian theology and immediate emancipation in Ohio and Kentucky during the antebellum period and how it motivated people toward anti-state and anti-clerical acts.

2019UndergraduateCertificateStudents


MadeleineGilson‘19SENIOR THESIS

Fractured Families: A Qualitative Study of Deteriorating Kin Support among Parents in the Child Welfare SystemAdvised by Matthew Desmond

Qualitative interview study of the kin support in the child welfare system. Conducted in-depth interviews of 27 parents with child welfare involvement to understand the role of kin support in parents’ experience of CPS.

TamiaL.Goodman‘19SENIOR THESIS

Who Really Keeps Count of Guns? An Empirical Study of Legislation’s Impact on Firearm Purchases in the United StatesAdvised by Orley Ashenfelter

An empirical analysis of the relationship between gun legislation, gun sentiments and gun sales in the United States.

TyishaGriffiths‘19SENIOR THESIS

Dressed to Impress: Shifting the Perceivable Competence and Threat Evaluations of African American MenAdvised by Alexander Todorov

Testing the effect of clothing type (“rich” versus “poor”) as a potential threat disarming mechanism for Black men and examining the neural correlates of this phenomenon.

Tylor-MariaJohnson‘19SENIOR THESIS

Don’t See Me White: A Study of the Constructions of Roma Identity in the United States Advised by Arun Hendi

Roma are an ethnic minority group in Europe with growing populations in the United States. This study examines how American Roma self-identify, how asylum courts identify Roma, and how both constructions of identity are in tension with one another. Based on eight semi-structured interviews with Roma, individuals self-identify either by ethnicity or nationality based on their interactions. Tylor proposes that the court imposes a conception of Roma identity that is at odds with the identity constructed by Roma individuals, and the scholarly disciplines not used in courts that view identity as a social construction.


HannahPaynter‘19SENIOR THESIS

Think Big: Counteracting Academic Stereotype Threat via Self-Affirmation and High Construal Level ThoughtAdvised by Susan T. Fiske

This thesis explores the effective convergence of self-affirmation and higher construal levels as interventions for women in math.

JanelleT.Spence‘19SENIOR THESIS

Black Film As Art: Conceptions of Black Film in Brazil and Cuba Advised by Rachel Price

This thesis explores the notion of black film within South America and Latin America, paying particular attention to black film produced in Brazil and Cuba, and examines whether the concept of black film applies to the two countries given their histories of negating blackness in favor of national ideals of the “myth of democracy” and “cubanidad” respectively. In order to do so, Black Film As Art looks closely at two black-directed documentary films, one from each country.

LaylaVarkey‘19SENIOR THESIS

The Park, The Bohemia, The University: A Historical and Theoretical Analysis of Displacements of African-American Communities in ManhattanAdvised by Anna Stilz

In this thesis, she examines gentrification and urban transformation in New York City from 1822 to the present, engaging with political theory literatures on displacement and the right to the city. After undertaking a historical and theoretical analysis of the place-based interests violated in three historical cases of displacement in Manhattan, she proposes specific policy recommendations for cases of urban displacement.


Students given the opportunity to ask AAS Concentrators about their experience in the department.Photo by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy


Undergraduate Concentration Overview and Requirements

Students who choose to declare a concentration in African American Studies experience a fuller account of the field, preparing them for a range of professions, as well as graduate work in African American Studies.

The steps to complete the concentration are as follows:Students complete two core survey courses listed below. At least one of these must be a Pre-20th century course.

• AAS 245 Introduction to 20th Century African American Art• AAS 353 African American Literature: Origins to 1910 (Pre-20th century)• AAS 359 African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance to Present• AAS 366 African American History to 1863 (Pre-20th century)• AAS 367 African American History Since Emancipation

In the fall of their junior year, concentrators take AAS 300 Junior Seminar: Research and Writing in African American Studies. This course introduces students to theories and methods of research design in African American Studies in preparation for the junior paper.

At the end of their fall semester, juniors declare a subfield to pursue, selecting from:

• African American Culture and Life (AACL)• Global Race and Ethnicity (GRE)• Race and Public Policy (RPP)


Four courses must be taken in the chosen subfield with two additional courses as follows:

• If the chosen subfield is AACL or RPP, then two GRE courses. • If the chosen subfield is GRE, then one AACL and one RPP.

Students may choose up to two approved cognate courses in other departments. In total, nine courses are required for the concentration.

Additional RequirementsConcentrators must demonstrate proficiency by completing independent writing and research. In the spring of their junior year, students complete independent research in order to write a junior paper that incorporates African American Studies. Seniors complete independent reading and research to develop a senior thesis that incorporates African American Studies and their chosen subfield. Seniors take a comprehensive exam derived from the work of their thesis.

Senior Colloquium Concentrators are required to participate in the Senior Colloquium, which seeks to provide a space for seniors concentrating in African American Studies to reflect upon their experiences within the Department, and upon how the understanding and insight they have gained here can and should influence their lives beyond graduation. The Senior Colloquium meets a total of six times per term. A member of the AAS core faculty leads each colloquium meeting.

Senior Thesis & ExamDuring the senior year each student, with the guidance of a faculty advisor, must complete independent work, which consists of writing a thesis. The senior thesis will then serve as the basis of the senior comprehensive exam.

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Micah Richard Herskind ‘19 Buffalo, New York

Micah Herskind, from Buffalo, NY, is a member of the Class of 2019 focusing on Race and Public Policy while pursuing a certificate in the American Studies Program. Micah was drawn to the African American Studies department through his involvement with Students for Prison Education and Reform (SPEAR) and summer internships, where he has learned about the carceral state’s disproportionate impact on people of color and those living in poverty.

His research interests include exploring the reproduction of social and racial inequality through 21st century reform efforts and modern developments in public policy, and he hopes to pursue independent research and a career that allow him to find his place in national and global struggles for prison abolition and social justice. While he is unsure where that may take him, he will be pursuing a law degree and continuing to grapple with the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and privilege. In addition to serving as co-president of SPEAR, Micah has served as an LGBT Peer Educator, was a proud member of Princeton’s interfaith group and the Episcopal Church at Princeton, and was co-founder of Progressive Christians at Princeton.

SENIOR THESIS

Decoding Decarceration: Race, Risk, and Reform in New Jersey, 1986-2017 Advised by Naomi Murakawa

His thesis examines the 21st-century criminal justice reform movement, arguing that—despite unbridled fanfare over bipartisan reform—the recent reform movement has entrenched the carceral state and more deeply intertwined Blackness and criminality.

Photo by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy 32


Cierra Belize Robson ‘19 Boston, Massachusetts

Cierra Robson is most interested in the ways in which advances in science and technology can mold global conceptions and depictions of race and race relations. Cierra was originally drawn to the department after her work in Boston’s Museum of African American History as a senior in high school, and solidified her decision to join the department after studying mass incarceration at the Harvard Kennedy School in the summer of 2016. In the summer of 2017, Cierra completed an internship with the Intellectual Property Operations Team at Facebook, studying international intellectual property law. Outside of her course of study, Cierra is a member of the Undergraduate Board of Advisors for the African American Studies Department, an appointed member of the Undergraduate Student Government’s Diversity and Equity Committee, a Project Leader for the Community House After School Program (CHASA), and the Co-Editor in Chief of an online and print publication called The Stripes. After completing her undergraduate course of study, Cierra will continue her studies at Harvard University, and eventually work to create global socially sustainable businesses.

SENIOR THESIS

In the Eye of the Shareholder: Racialized Surveillance Capitalism in Oakland, CaliforniaAdvised by Ruha Benjamin

This work explores how the practice of racialized surveillance in Oakland, California relates to broader national and global economic and political priorities, by focusing on the construction of a city-wide surveillance called the “Domain Awareness Center”. She is interested in how these priorities are used to justify enhanced surveillance of racialized populations.


Sadie Van Vranken ‘19 Denver, Colorado

Sadie Van Vranken’s initial interest in the department developed during a summer internship studying the intersection of theology and race. As she further explored the department, she was most interested in pursuing independent study of the history of racial policy in the United States and the history of black radicalism.

She pursued studies in French and Arabic and was interested in connecting her studies in the AAS department with global questions of race and power. On campus, Sadie was involved in Princeton’s Christian a cappella group and Princeton Christian Fellowship. After Princeton, Sadie is considering going to graduate school, teaching high school history classes, or going to law school.

SENIOR THESIS

Controlling Freedom and Constructing Black Criminality: Gallows Literature and the Black Civic Voice in the Antebellum NorthAdvised by Tera W. Hunter

This thesis examines the pamphlets produced following the execution of African Americans in the Antebellum North, arguing that gallows literature allowed for the elevation or silencing of the criminal’s voice. Gallows literature played a key part in the debate over the meaning of black freedom in the wake of the first emancipation.


Distinguished Senior Prize in African American StudiesAwarded annually to the senior concentrator who has distinguished his or herself academically as well as beyond the classroom, reflecting a commitment to the intellectual, political, and artistic traditions in African American Studies.

MicahRichardHerskind‘19

AAS Spirit AwardThis award is selected annually by the AAS staff and is given to a senior for their positive contributions to the Department of African American Studies. It recognizes students who informally make a significant contribution to the faculty, students, and staff of the department.

CierraBelizeRobson‘19

Outstanding Junior Paper in African American Studies PrizeThis prize is awarded annually to the senior who submitted the most outstanding Junior Paper.

CierraBelizeRobson‘19

The Phi Beta Kappa SocietyThe oldest of all national honorary scholastic societies, honoring the best and brightest liberal arts and science undergraduates with the motto “Love of learning is the guide of life.”

SadieVanVranken‘19


2019 Senior Prizes & Winners


Ruth J. Simmons Thesis PrizeEach year a cash prize is awarded to an AAS student whose senior thesis best exhibits excellence in research and writing within the field of African American Studies. Ruth J. Simmons is a Princeton University trustee, president emerita of Brown University, and an honorary member of the Department of African American Studies Advisory Council, who has generously endowed the prize.

2019

Decoding Decarceration: Race, Risk, and Reform in New Jersey, 1986-2017


2018

Playing Time/(with) Swinging Doors: A Critique of Hope and Hopelessness in the Tradition of Black Male Letters

ImaniNoelleFord‘18

“A Race Outcast from an Outcast Class” : Black Americans and the Experience and Representation of U.S. Communism in the Interwar Period, 1919-1941

NickySteidel‘18

2017

“Sing the Song of Her Possibilities”: The Redefinition of the Black Girl During the Black Women’s Renaissance of the 1970’s and 1980’s

DestinyCrockett‘17

Igiaba Scego’s ‘Beyond Babylon’: A Translation from the Italian

AaronRobertson‘17

2016

Georgia on My Mind: My Family and African American Experiences in Southwest Georgia, 1900-1970

CameronBell‘16

Protecting the Lawful, Combatting the Lawless: Racialized Police Violence and the 1967 Newark Uprising

AudreyBerdahl-Baldwin‘16

2015

“Tough Love”: How One High-Performing Charter School Implicitly Criminalizes Youth of Color

ShawonJackson‘15

Myopic Justice: A Brief Intellectual History of Colorblind Law, 1880-1896

SarahYerima‘15

2014

From Mold to Molt: Aesthetics and the Matter of Race

DixonLi‘14

Free Blacks, Freeborn Slaves, and Bondsmen in a Free State: African American Life and Black Political Action During New Jersey’s Emancipatory Period, c. 1820-1845

KellenHeniford‘14

2013

The Modern Day Lynch Mob: Racism, Juries, and Capital Punishment in the United States

MollyBagshaw‘13

Transnational Angst: Black Existentialism in Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Narratives

OsasumwenBenjamin‘13


I like to say the African American Studies Department possesses a radical imagination.

By this, I mean that the department pushes students not only to think critically about our world’s problems, but also about feasible solutions. In Stanhope, our professors, post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduate colleagues push us to ask normative questions about power. More than what is, we ask what should be. The department’s multidisciplinary approach teaches us that reforms of broken systems are not enough, that some of the best solutions come from the imagined worlds of fiction or artwork, and that history often repeats itself and has effects that ripple globally. The African American Studies Department has fundamentally shaped my understanding of the world.

But Stanhope is more than just a building with people who learn things. More than my intellectual curiosity, the department has cultivated a community that I feel so honored to be a part of.

I was eighteen when I first entered Stanhope Hall. It was my first day of class during my first year at Princeton, and I remember being struck by how kind, welcoming and passionate

the entire building was. In that first week alone, I—an eager freshman pushing to enroll in an upper-level seminar—had already emailed and received responses from nearly all of the staff, two of the professors, and the departmental chair. As I walked into Stanhope on that first day, I realized that this widespread willingness to guide students wherever possible was a trademark of the department. I was greeted by smiling faces, snacks on the table, and an intellectual space where I was encouraged to collaborate rather than to compete. One year later, I regularly scheduled office hours to chat about life with professors who were interested not only in my academic work but also my emotional and mental wellbeing. As a junior in the department, several graduate students called me weekly while I studied abroad to help me workshop my Junior Independent Work over a five-hour time difference despite their looming general examinations. As a senior writing my thesis, I could often be found in the main office venting to any number of the staff members about my frustrations. I have experienced my highest highs and my lowest lows in that small building. No matter what the circumstance, I was always surrounded by support.

There is an energy and love in Stanhope that seeps into every crack and corner. Princeton’s campus can feel daunting,

UNDERGRADUATE REFLECTION

The Experience of Cierra Robson ’19


isolating and often outright traumatic. Through all of this, Stanhope has been my home: a place where I can wholly be myself, where I have met some of my closest friends and mentors, and where I feel empowered and energized to do good for the world. It is nearly impossible to condense four years of truly life-changing experience into only a few words.

I am indebted to this department for so many things, but as I move to the next chapter in my life, I can say with confidence that the thing that I will miss the most is the extraordinarily rare collection of loving, daring, and inspiring minds. These people have helped make me who I am today and have helped guide me to my future paths.

Photo by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy

Cierra Robson ‘19 during Fac/Grad Seminar event


Study Abroad OpportunitiesStudents in the department have the opportunity to study abroad in programs related to African American Studies for a semester (fall or spring), a year, or a summer. The department offers recommendations for programs students may enjoy, but there are no restrictions on eligible programs.

“I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.”

— James Baldwin


AAS Undergraduate Funding OpportunitiesConcentrators who require research funding for independent work may apply to the Department of African American Studies for support. Students must provide a full account of their research proposal and a detailed itemized budget. If travel is desired, student must submit a planned itinerary.

Junior Paper Research FundingTo assist concentrators in building expertise and a library, the Department of African American Studies provides AAS concentrators funding for up to eight books that are essential to their junior independent work.

Summer Research FundingSummer awards provide financial support to enable Princeton University undergraduates to pursue worthy projects that provide important opportunities for research and/or personal growth, foster independence, creativity, and leadership skills, and broaden or deepen their understanding of the subject matter within the field.

Senior Thesis Research FundingThe Department of African American Studies (AAS) offers senior thesis research grants to Princeton students who plan to research in a subject for their Senior Thesis related to the field of African American Studies.

Concentrators Conference FundingThis opportunity provides funds to AAS Concentrators to attend relevant academic conferences.

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Graduate Studies Program in AAS

The Graduate Studies program in African American Studies provides an opportunity for students to complement doctoral studies in their home department with coordinated interdisciplinary training in African American Studies. Students entering the program may come from any department in the Humanities and Social Sciences.Graduate engagement with the department is not limited to students pursuing requirements of the certificate. Participation in the Faculty-Graduate Seminar, with its annually rotating focus area, is open to all Princeton graduate students seeking to engage in the intellectually stimulating community of the department. Recent seminar topics include ‘Black Studies in the Digital Age,’ ‘Sexuality in African American Communities and Cultures,’ ‘Black Studies and Biopolitics,’ ‘African/American Diasporic Literature’ and ‘The Politics of Black Families and Intimacies.’ The department also sponsors programming and events throughout the academic year for graduate students at all stages.

Graduate Studies in AAS 44

“ Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the worlds you cannot live within”

— Ruha Benjamin

RequirementsStudents wishing to obtain a graduate certificate in African American Studies are encouraged to consult with their home department advisers and the African American Studies Director of Graduate Affairs, ideally during their first year, to plan their course of study. Interested students provide an application of their interest to the department and must complete all requirements listed below.

Earning the Graduate CertificateThe graduate course of study is determined by the graduate student’s home department adviser in consultation with the Curriculum Committee in the Department of African American Studies. Certificate requirements include completion of AAS 500 African American Intellectual Tradition and two other courses in the Humanities or Social Sciences:

a) Whose contents are judged to be devoted primarily to race; orb) for which they write research papers devoted to race; orc) which are independent study topics tailored to the student’s interests in race.


2018-2019 Faculty-Graduate SeminarThe Faculty-Graduate seminar is an intimate intellectual community that comes together to discuss work in progress around a common theme across a wide range of disciplines. Our goal is to establish a small but intellectually diverse and committed group of scholars who will attend all meetings and engage in sustained discourse during the year. Each meeting lasts one hour and twenty minutes, followed by dinner. We encourage graduate students to commit to both semesters and preference for spring registration will be given to students engaged in the fall seminar. Participation in the African American Studies’ Faculty-Graduate Seminar for one academic year or the equivalent (two semesters) will fulfill one of the requirements for the AAS Graduate Certificate.

2018-2019 FACULT Y GRADUATE TOPIC

Surveilling Blackness: Race and the Maximum-Security Society

This seminar explores the intersection of technology, surveillance, and inequality. While the Cambridge Analytics scandal and the rise of facial recognition databases have sparked calls for privacy protections and algorithmic transparency, mainstream protest generally ignores the racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities that fundamentally structure the normalization of surveillance. Blackness is a key site through which surveillance technologies are innovated, concentrated, and justified, but, as Simone Browne has noted, surveillance studies leave race in general and Blackness in particular under-theorized. Over the course of this yearlong seminar, we will situate newer algorithmic, biometric, and information technologies within the longer history of surveillance practices rooted in anti-Black domination, colonialism, and counterinsurgency. This series also explores the freedom practices of anti-surveillance and counter-surveillance, as well as technology’s role in the struggle for liberation. Invited presenters include scholars, activists, and activist-scholars working in the fields of African American studies, law, philosophy, information studies, history, sociology, and statistics.


2018-2019 Guest Speakers

Fall ’18

November 8, 2018 – Hamid Khan, Stop Spying LAPD Coalition

November 15, 2018 – Jordan Camp, Barnard College

November 29, 2018 – Jessica Eaglin, University of Indiana Bloomington

Spring ’19

February 12, 2019 – Elizabeth Hinton, Harvard University

March 5, 2019 – Mariame Kaba, Social Justice Institute, Barnard Center for Research on Women

April 2, 2019 – Kadija Ferryman, Data & Society

April 9, 2019 – Virginia Eubanks, University of Albany, SUNY

April 23, 2019 – Carla Shedd, The Graduate Center, CUNY


Caleb Joseph David Maskell, Ph.D. Media, Pennsylvania

DISSERTATION

American Icarus: Imagining Millennial Benevolence, 1814-1851

American Icarus is a study of the explosive development of evangelical Protestant societies for national Christianization in the years after the War of 1812, chief among them the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, and the American Colonization Society. It is focused on the political visions of future perfection that underwrote the work of these societies, organized around their Christian eschatological rhetoric of the soon-coming millennium. The dissertation shows how Christian eschatology provided ideological coherence to these societies, while also showing that they were fundamentally organized around white supremacy — imagining that the millennial goal of national Christianization really meant establishing a white Christian America. When white abolitionists began to challenge this ideology in 1834, a millennial malaise began to take hold, calling forth alternative millennialisms from white Protestants that would tether their millennial eschatological metahistories to concrete earthly historicity.

2019GraduateCertificateRecipients


Heath Pearson, Ph.D. Marion, Indiana

DISSERTATION

The Carceral Outside: How Privatized Land Produces Racialized Labor in an American Prison Town

The Carceral Outside explores the evolution of a rural town in New Jersey that, over the course of two hundred years of capital accumulation, has transformed from an agricultural hub into a town with four prisons, a regional jail, and three police departments. It examines how the transformation of land over time was related to the search for and exploitation of laborers, and how that relationship between land and labor became racialized, paving the way for a rural “prison town.” The study is anchored by a detailed land history of each prison site, beginning in the late-eighteenth century and continuing to the present, and is bolstered by a chronicle of family and life histories based on more than two hundred ethnographic interviews. U.S. “mass incarceration” and the “war on drugs” have been framed primarily as federal responses to deindustrialization driven by a racist backlash to expanded civil rights in the mid-twentieth century. This dissertation challenges that story, arguing instead that the long durée of carceral control and forced labor manifests as a core technique of market democracy. By historicizing the relationship between privatized land and racialized labor, The Carceral Outside shows how “mass incarceration” is only the current manifestation of market democracy’s continual re/production of a racialized division of laborers.


What does it mean to belong to the African American intellectual tradition?

Professors Eddie Glaude and Imani Perry asked this question as we sat in the first session of “AAS 500: African-American Intellectual Tradition.” It has stuck with me. And in September, when I begin a fellowship at the University of Michigan, with an appointment as an assistant professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, it will be my turn to help others explore this question.

You could likely ask fifteen people this question and get fifteen different answers. The tradition I learned at Princeton has not given me one answer. It has given me an approach. And this approach is best understood through jazz.

New Orleans Trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah calls his recent music Stretch Music. When asked to elaborate on Stretch as genre-bending jazz, he said, “everywhere we toured in the world, all these younger kids kept telling us we created stretch music. We didn’t know what…they were talking about.” But it was exciting and giving courage to all these kids who were making music right where they lived. As I have come to see it, Stretch Music does more than extend

the boundaries of jazz or meld together dissonant sounds in a form that we academics might call “interdisciplinary.” It invites the listener to stretch out, to pause what you should know or what you have come to expect, and to stretch your ears to the music, to stretch your soul to the vibrations that are created when material struggle meets New Orleans jazz meets futuristic creativity meets collective celebration meets, to quote aTunde Adjuah again, “motherfuckers play[ing] in their neighborhood[s].” Stretch Music is not a genre to be picked up and put down. It is not memorizing scales. It is a way of being in the world. A creative and expansive way of getting along that is invitational, that enters into unfamiliar spaces with others, and that sits firmly within and at times honors and remembers tradition, but strictly refuses legalism to the tradition’s own definitions and boundaries.

The tradition I learned as a graduate student in AAS taught me to stretch. To stretch into conversations and across disciplinary boundaries in order to collaborate in the creating of spaces for liberation. Universities can be highly legalistic institutions where new ideas get pulverized in an environment clinging to its racist, sexist, and classist culture. The practices of Stretch, however, bring with them the unthinkable possibilities of expanding disciplines and genres rather than simply

GRADUATE REFLECTION

The Experience of Heath Pearson, Ph.D.


Courtesy of Youtube

reproducing them. Stretch also includes a rigorous attention to the world, almost a prescription for loving the world, that requires a re-engagement with the past while crafting *new* visions for many futures. Very explicitly not the academic in the ivory tower. And finally, Stretch demands the shimmer of brilliance. Not merely brilliance in the construction of an argument, but brilliance in how an argument moves, how it moves us, how it moves light that we might see differently.

Brilliance that is diamond-like. Not didactic-like.

My time as a graduate student in AAS, with Professor Imani Perry as my dissertation advisor, taught me to stretch. May I embody that stretch in all facets of my life, academic or otherwise, as I carry these lessons elsewhere, inviting others to bring with them the music of their neighborhoods as we continue writing songs of the tradition.

Heath during opening remarks at the 2017 AAS Graduate Conference


AAS Programming & Highlights

The Department of African American Studies offers a wide variety of events and programs during the academic year. Through these thought-provoking topics and bold speakers, we aim to educate and empower students, the Princeton campus, and our local community.

Programming & Highlights 52

Fall 2018 Events

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce RacismThu, December 6, 2018

Course Event — History of Black Gospel MusicTue, December 4, 2018

An Evening with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hosted by Keeanga-Yamahtta TaylorNovember 28, 2018

Graduate Conference: “i am my ancestors’ wildest dream” Contemporary Culture of Black Impossibility Graduate Student Organizers: Kimberly Bain and Chaya CrowderOctober 18 - 20, 2018

Faculty Graduate Seminar: “Surveilling Blackness: Race & the Maximum-Security Society” October 2018 - April 2019


An Evening with Ta-Nehisi CoatesPhoto by Mark Czajkowski


Faculty-Graduate Seminar: “Surveilling Blackness: Race & the Maximum-Security Society”Photo by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy


FEATURED EVENT

Graduate Conference:“i am my ancestors’wildest dreams”Contemporary cultures of black impossibility The Black impossible is at once about continuing to live and resist in the face of the debilitating policies of modernity (impossible to do, but nevertheless done), yet also about the seeming impossibility of ever just living. It draws together modes of cultural responses to the ethos of life and living in the face of practices of discipline and death.

How has contemporary Black culture responded to, resisted, and existed in the face of this tension? What do we make of the visual, sonic, material, and digital cultures (to name a few) of the now? How do the realities of culture manifest themselves through and as political behavior? How do we turn to cultural productions as sites of life and living? How do we define the impossible?

The second biannual conference of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University will explore the contemporary cultures of the Black impossible.

This conference seeks to bring together intellectuals, artists and organizers working across many different disciplines, mediums and movements that speak to the cultures and the impossibility of Black life in the U.S. and abroad.


Spring 2019 Events

Solitary: A Conversation with Albert Woodfox Wed, April 17, 2019

Jessica A. Levy’s Spring Lecture — From Black Power to Black Empowerment Tue, April 16, 2019

Film Screening: Toni Morrison’s “The Foreigner’s Home” Wed, April 10, 2019

AAS Faculty Book Celebration Wed, March 27, 2019

Remorseless Cannibals And Loving Scribes: Samples and Highlights from Princeton University’s Collection of Ethiopian Manuscripts (1500s-1900s) Tue, March 12, 2019

The Sports, Race, and Society Lecture with Michael Bennett Mon, March 11, 2019

UBA Event — Film Screening “For Ahkeem” Thu, February 21, 2019

Olivia Mena’s Spring Lecture — Race, Walls, & Capitalism: A Social History of the Border Wall Wed, February 6, 2019

Programming & Highlights 58Programming & Highlights 58

Remorseless Cannibals And Loving Scribes: Samples and Highlights from Princeton University’s Collection of Ethiopian Manuscripts Photos by Jordan Hebert, PUL Digital Imaging Studio


The Mills Sports, Race, and Society Lecture with Michael BennettPhoto by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy

Solitary: A Conversation with Albert WoodfoxPhoto by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy



FEATURED EVENT

Class Day & Commencement

This year, we graduated our second class, and the cohort was particularly strong. Our concentrators were joined by ten graduating seniors who completed a certificate in African American Studies, and two doctoral degree students who earned graduate certificates in African American Studies. We know that these young scholars will continue to excel and make an impact in every arena they enter.

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Our FacultyThe department holds many of the most prolific and notable African American Studies scholars in the world.

AAS Core Faculty

Anna Arabindan-Kesson Page 64

Wendy L. Belcher Page 64

Ruha Benjamin Page 65

Wallace D. Best Page 65

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Page 66

Reena N. Goldthree Page 66

Joshua B. Guild Page 67

Tera W. Hunter

Naomi Murakawa Page 68

Kinohi Nishikawa Page 69

Chika O. Okeke-Agulu Page 69

Imani Perry Page 70

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Page 71

Autumn M. Womack Page 72

Our Faculty 64

Anna Arabindan-Kesson Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Archaeology & Department of African American Studies

Professor Arabindan-Kesson is an assistant professor of African American and Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Department of Art and Archaeology and is a faculty fellow at Wilson College. Born in Sri Lanka, she

completed undergraduate degrees in New Zealand and Australia, and worked as a Registered Nurse in the UK before completing her doctoral degree in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University.

Professor Arabindan-Kesson focuses on African American, Caribbean, and British Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, and transatlantic visual culture in the long 19th century.

Her courses include survey classes on African American and Caribbean Art, and more specialized undergraduate and graduate seminars such as, “Seeing to Remember: Representing Slavery Across the Black Atlantic and Art of the British Empire.”

Her first book, under contract with Duke University Press, is entitled Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World.

Wendy L. Belcher Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature & Department of African American Studies

Professor Wendy Laura Belcher is an associate professor of African literature with a joint appointment in the Princeton University Department of Comparative Literature and the Department for African American Studies. Working

at the intersection of diaspora, postcolonial, medieval, and early modern studies, she has a special interest in the literatures of Ethiopia and Ghana and is working to bring attention to early African literature (written between 1300 and 1900), particularly that in African languages, through her research and translation.

One multi-book comparative project aims to demonstrate how African thought has animated British and European canonical literature. This includes the widely reviewed finalist for the Bethwell A. Ogot Award for best book on East Africa: Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author (Oxford, May 2012), which theorizes the discursive possession of English authors and texts. The next part of the project is in progress, a book titled The Black Queen of Sheba: A Global History of an African Idea (under contract with Princeton University Press) about the circulation of Ethiopian thought in Europe from 1000 to 2000.


She is the co-translator with Michael Kleiner of perhaps the first book-length biography of an African woman, originally written in Gəˁəz (classical Ethiopic), the The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman (Princeton University Press, 2015; concise edition, 2018), for which she received the Fulbright US Scholars Award. Meanwhile, she is working on a book titled Ladder of Heaven: The Miracles of the Virgin Mary in Ethiopian Literature and Art (under contract with Princeton University Press).

Ruha Benjamin Associate Professor & Arthur H. Scribner Bicentennial Preceptor, Department of African American Studies

Ruha Benjamin specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology; race-ethnicity and gender; knowledge and power. She is author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford

University Press 2013), Race After Technology (Polity 2019), and editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke University Press 2019), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

Professor Benjamin received her Bachelor of Arts in sociology

and anthropology from Spelman College, Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Institute for Advanced Study. In 2017, she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.

Wallace D. Best Professor, Department of Religion & Department of African American Studies

Wallace D. Best specializes in 19th and 20th century African American religious history. His research and teaching focus on the areas of African American religion, religion and literature, Pentecostalism, and Womanist theology. He has held

fellowships at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.

Professor Best is the author of Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 ( Princeton University Press, 2007), and Langston’s Salvation: American religion and the Bard of Harlem (New York University Press, 2017)

Our Faculty 66

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor & Department Chair, Department of African American Studies

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is a scholar who speaks to the black and blue in America. His most well-known books, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, and In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black

America, take a wide look at black communities and reveal complexities, vulnerabilities, and opportunities for hope.

He is chair of the Department of African American Studies, a program he first became involved with shaping as a doctoral candidate in Religion at Princeton.

Currently Glaude is at work on a book about James Baldwin, titled Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own. Of Baldwin, Glaude writes, “Baldwin’s writing does not bear witness to the glory of America. It reveals the country’s sins, and the illusion of innocence that blinds us to the reality of others. Baldwin’s vision then requires a confrontation with history (with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, with whiteness) to overcome its hold on us. Not to posit the greatness of America, but to establish the ground upon which to imagine the country anew.”

Reena N. Goldthree Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies

Reena Goldthree specializes in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research and teaching focus on social movements; political theory; labor and migration; and Caribbean feminisms. She earned her bachelor’s degree in

History-Sociology (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Columbia University and her master’s degree and doctoral degree in History from Duke University. Her current book project, Democracy Shall be no Empty Romance: War and the Politics of Empire in the Greater Caribbean, examines how the crisis of World War I transformed Afro-Caribbeans’ understanding of, and engagements with, the British Empire.

Beyond the book manuscript, her work has appeared in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, The American Historian, and Radical Teacher. She is the co-editor of a special issue of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies on gender and anti-colonialism in the interwar Caribbean (December 2018). She has also published essays in New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2018), Caribbean Military Encounters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and Global Circuits of Blackness: Interrogating the African Diasporas (University of Illinois Press, 2010). Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from


the American Historical Association, Coordinating Council for Women in History, Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright.

Professor Goldthree is an Associated Faculty Member in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and in the Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS).

Joshua B. Guild Associate Professor, Department of History & Department of African American Studies

Joshua Guild specializes in twentieth-century African American social and cultural history, urban history, and the making of the modern African diaspora, with particular interests in migration, black internationalism, black

popular music, and the black radical tradition. A graduate of Wesleyan University, where he was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, he received his doctoral degree in History and African American Studies from Yale. His research has been supported by fellowships and awards from a number of institutions, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. In

2012, he was a fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of African and African American Research.

Guild is currently completing his first book, In the Shadows of the Metropolis: Cultural Politics and Black Communities in Postwar New York and London, which will be published by Oxford University Press. The book examines African- American and Afro-Caribbean migration and community formation in central Brooklyn and west London from the 1930s through the 1970s. He has published or has forthcoming essays on topics ranging from the pioneering Brooklyn politician Shirley Chisholm, the politics of calypso in the age of decolonization and civil rights, and Black Power in diasporic perspective. His next book project, tentatively entitled The City Lives in You: The Black Freedom Struggle and the Futures of New Orleans, will focus on struggles for racial and economic justice in New Orleans from the mid-20th century black freedom movement through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil disaster.

Professor Guild’s interests in digital humanities, new media, and public engagement are reflected in the 2014-15 African American Studies Faculty-Graduate Seminar that he organized, “Black Studies in the Digital Age.” He serves on the Executive Committee of Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities. He is also an Associated Faculty member in the Program in Urban Studies.

Professor Guild is the Director of Graduate Affairs in the Department of African American Studies.

Our Faculty 68

Tera W. Hunter Edwards Professor of American History,Department of History & Department of African American Studies

Tera W. Hunter is Professor of History and African American Studies at Princeton University. She is a scholar of labor, gender, race, and Southern history.

A native of Miami, Professor Hunter attended Duke University where

she graduated whit distinction in History. She received a MPhil in History from Yale University and a doctoral degree. from Yale. Professor Hunter previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She joined Princeton faculty in the fall of 2007.

Her first book, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, was awarded the H. L. Mitchell Award in 1998 from the southern Historical Association, the Letitia Brown Memorial Book Prize in 1997 from the Association of Black Women’s Historians and the Book of the Year Award in 1997 from the International Labor History Association. Most recently, she released, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century.

Professor Hunter is also co-authoring: The Making of People: a History if African-Americans with Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis under contract with W. W. Norton Press.

Naomi Murakawa Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies

Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st-century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and

the carceral state. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford University Press, 2014), and her work has appeared in Law & Society Review, Theoretical Criminology, Du Bois Review, and several edited volumes. She has received fellowships from Columbia Law School’s Center for the Study of Law and Culture, as well the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Research Program.

Prior to joining African American Studies at Princeton, she taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. Professor Murakawa received her bachelor’s degree in women’s studies from Columbia University, her master’s degree in social policy from the London School of Economics, and her doctoral degree in political science from Yale University.


Kinohi Nishikawa Assistant Professor & John E. Annan Bicentennial Preceptor, Department of English & Department of African American Studies

Kinohi Nishikawa specializes in twentieth-century African American literature, book history, and popular culture. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Dartmouth College and his doctoral degree in Literature from Duke University.

At Princeton Nishikawa teaches courses on African American humor, African American authors (James Baldwin) and Afro-Asian studies.

Nishikawa’s first book, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. His major work in progress is Black Paratext, a study of how book design has influenced the production and reception of African American literature from World War II to the present. Nishikawa has published widely on modern African American print culture, with a particular emphasis on newspapers, magazines, and independent publishers.

Recent publications include an essay on black experimental novelist William Melvin Kelley in American Literary History (2018) and an article on Black Arts movement editor Hoyt W. Fuller in Chicago Review (2016). Nishikawa has also contributed chapters to the forthcoming collections Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights (Illinois),

African American Expression in Print and Digital Culture (Wisconsin), and Are You Entertained? New Essays on Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Duke).

Chika O. Okeke-Agulu Professor, Department of Art and Archaeology & Department of African American Studies

Chika O. Okeke-Agulu is Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Art & Archaeology. He specializes in classical, modern, and contemporary African and African Diaspora art history and theory. He previously taught at The

Pennsylvania State University, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and Yaba College of Technology, Lagos. He is the author of Obiora Udechukwu: Line, Image, Text (Skira Editore, 2016); Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Duke, 2015); and (with Okwui Enwezor), Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (Damiani, 2010). He is coeditor of Ezumeezu: Essays on Contemporary Art and Architecture, a festschrift in Honour of Demas Nwoko (Goldline & Jacobs, 2012); and Who Knows Tomorrow (König, 2010) In 2006, he edited the first ever issue of African Arts dedicated to African Modernism, and his writings have appeared in African Arts, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Internationalism, Artforum International, New York Times, Packett, South Atlantic Quarterly, October. He is co-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and maintains the blog Ọfọdunka.

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In 2007, Professor Okeke-Agulu was appointed the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at Williams College, and Fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (2008). He was a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow (2010). Among his many awards and prizes are: Honorable Mention, The Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication (triennial) Award (Arts Council of African Studies Association, 2017); The Melville J. Herskovits Prize for the most important scholarly work in African Studies published in English during the preceding year (African Studies Association, 2016); Distinguished Alumnus Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts (The College of Arts, University of South Florida, Tampa, 2016); Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism (College Art Association, 2016); and Outstanding Dissertation (triennial) award (Arts Council of African Studies Association, 2007).

Okeke-Agulu serves on the board of directors of College Art Association, the advisory board of the Center for the Study of Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the executive board of Princeton in Africa, and editorial boards of African Studies Review and Journal of Igbo Studies.

Imani Perry Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies, Department of African American Studies

The Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies and faculty associate in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton, Perry has written and taught on a number of topics regarding race and African American culture. Using

methods of discussion and analysis from various fields of study—including law, literary and cultural studies, music, and the social sciences—Perry’s work often focuses on multifaceted issues such as the influence of race on law, literature and music.

In her work, Perry has taken on complicated and timely issues. In her 2011 book, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States, for example, Perry discusses the ongoing intersection of race and politics in America.

In addition to More Beautiful, More Terrible, Perry is the author of Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, a cultural history of the black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Her biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant Life of Lorraine Hansberry was published in September 2018. Her book on patriarchy,

“We are running out of time, the earth isravaged,ourbodiesareindefinite;Lorraine reminds us to make use of each moment.”

— Imani Perry


Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation came out later in 2018 as well.

Perry’s forthcoming book Breath: A Letter To My Sons issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity.

Perry received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University. From there, she went on to obtain both her Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School and a doctoral degree in the history of American civilization from Harvard University

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Assistant Professor & Charles H. McIlwain University Preceptor, Department of African American Studies

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2016), an examination of the history and politics of Black America and the development of the social movement Black Lives Matter in

response to police violence in the United States. Taylor has received the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book.

Taylor’s most recent book, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, also with Haymarket

Books (2017) won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction.

Taylor’s research examines race and public policy including American housing policies. Professor Taylor is currently completing a manuscript titled Race for Profit: Black Homeownership and the End of the Urban Crisis, which looks at the federal government’s promotion of single-family homeownership in Black communities after the urban rebellions of the 1960s. Taylor looks at how the federal government’s turn to market-based solutions in its low-income housing programs in the 1970s impacted Black neighborhoods, Black women on welfare, and emergent discourses on the urban “underclass”. Taylor is interested in the role of private sector forces, typically hidden in public policy making and execution, in the “urban crisis” of the 1970s.

Taylor’s research has been supported, in part, by a multiyear Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship, the Ford Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. Taylor was the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013-2014. Taylor received her doctoral degree from the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University in 2013.

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Autumn M. Womack Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies and Department of English

Professor Autumn Womack specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature, with a particular research and teaching focus on the intersection of visual technology, race, and literary culture. She earned

her doctoral degree in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and from 2015-2016 she was a postdoctoral fellow in Rutgers University’s Department of English. Most recently, Professor Womack was a 2016 - 2017 faculty fellow at Penn State University’s Center for the History of Information (CHI).

Professor Womack’s book manuscript, Reform Visions: Race, Visuality, and Literature in the Progressive Era, examines the important formal and technical features of emergent visual technologies such as photography, motion pictures, and social surveys to black literary culture from the 1880s through the 1920s. She has published on this and other topics in Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Women and Performance, American Literary History, and SmallAxe Salon. Her contribution to a published roundtable on “Racism’s Afterlives” is forthcoming in J19: A Journal of 19th Century Americanists and her exploration of antebellum

data visualization in The Anglo-African Magazine will appear in Cambridge University’s volume Transitions in African American American Literature, 1850-1865.

Like her research, Professor Womack’s teaching is interdisciplinary in its scope. In addition to regularly teaching courses in the area of 19th-century African American literary culture, she has taught and developed courses on race and visual culture, literature and surveillance, as well as a single author course on Toni Morrison.


Wendy L. Belcher

PUBLISHED IN 2019

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, Second Edition: A Guide to Academic Publishing SuccessUniversity of Chicago Press

Ruha Benjamin

PUBLISHED IN 2019

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim CodePolity

Wallace D. Best

AWARDED IN 2018

Excellence in the Study of Religion in Textual StudiesThe American Academy of Religion

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

PUBLISHED IN 2018

An Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach to the Study of African American ReligionUniversity of Georgia Press

Tera W. Hunter

AWARDED IN 2018

Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History and/or Feminist Theory American Historical Association

Littleton-Griswold Prize in History of American Law and Society by American Historical Association and The American Society for Legal History

Mary Nickliss Price in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History Organization of American Historians

Stone Book Award Museum of African American History of Boston and Nantucket

Willie Lee Rose Prize Southern Association for Women Historians

2018-2019 Awards & Achievements

Our Faculty 74

Kinohi Nishikawa

PUBLISHED IN 2018

Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary UndergroundUniversity of Chicago Press


ACHIEVEMENT

El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale El Anatsui’s survey exhibition “Triumphant Scale” at Haus der Kunst – the first ever in Europe – is the most comprehensive and detailed presentation of his oeuvre thus far.

Imani Perry

PUBLISHED IN 2018

Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine HansberryBeacon Press

EDITOR’SCHOICE

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2018

AWARDED IN 2019

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award

PUBLISHED IN 2018

Vexy Thing: On Gender and LiberationDuke University Press

PUBLISHED IN 2018

May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National AnthemThe University of North Carolina Press

NOMINATED IN 2018

50th NAACP Image Awards, Outstanding Literary Work

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

PUBLISHED IN 2019

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black HomeownershipThe University of North Carolina Press

AWARDED IN 2018

Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction


With your presence, you transformed African American Studies at Princeton University. With

your words, you reshaped all of our lives. You will be missed, but your legacy lives on.

R E S T I N P E A C E

Toni Morrison1931 - 2019

Our Faculty 76Original photo taken by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders


Associated Faculty

Dannelle Gutarra-CorderoLecturer of

African American Studies

William A. GleasonHughes-Rogers Professor of

Department of English

Paul FrymerProfessor of

Department of Politics

J. Nicole Shelton Stuart Professor of

Department of Psychology

Jacob S. Dlamini Assistant Professor ofDepartment of History

Desmond D. JagmohanAssistant Professor ofDepartment of Politics

Simon GikandiRobert Schirmer Professor of

English, Department of English

Stacey A. SinclairProfessor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Department of Psychology

& Woodrow Wilson School

Our Faculty 78

Dara Z. StrolovitchAssociate Professor of

Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies

Judith WeisenfeldAgate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion Department of Religion

Leonard WantchekonProfessor of

Department of Politics

Keith A. Wailoo Chair & Henry Putnam

University Professor of History and Public Affairs, Department

of History

Monica Y. Youn Lecturer in Creative Writing

of Lewis Center for the Arts


Faculty Emeritus

Kwame Anthony AppiahLaurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus

Valerie SmithWoodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, and President

Swarthmore College

Nell Painter Edwards Professor of American

History, Emerita

Howard TaylorProfessor of

Department of Sociology

Toni MorrisonRobert F. Goheen Professor in the

Humanities, EmeritaIn Memoriam (1931 - 2019)

Claudia TateProfessor of English and African

American StudiesInMemoriam(1946-2002)

Albert Raboteau Henry Putnam Professor of

Religion, Department of Religion

Cornel WestProfessor of

African American Studies

Our Faculty 80

Fellows & Visiting Faculty

Nijah CunninghamCotsen Postdoctoral Fellow,

Society of Fellows

Cassandra JacksonVisiting Professor of Department

of African American Studies

Olivia MenaPostdoctoral Research Associate


Jessica A. LevyPostdoctoral Research Associate


None of us alone can save the nation or the world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.”

— Cornel West, Race Matters “

81

Publications & Articles

Lincoln signed a bill in 1862 that paid up to $300 for every enslaved person freed.

On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill emancipating enslaved people in Washington, the end of a long struggle. But to ease slaveowners’ pain, the District of Columbia Emancipation Act paid those loyal to the Union up to $300 for every enslaved person freed.

That’s right, slaveowners got reparations. Enslaved African-Americans got nothing for their generations of stolen bodies, snatched children and expropriated labor other than their mere release from legal bondage.

The compensation clause is not likely to be celebrated today. But as the debate about reparations for slavery intensifies, it is important to remember that slaveowners, far more than enslaved people, were always the primary beneficiaries of public largess.

The act is notable because it was the first time that the federal government authorized abolition of slavery, which hastened its demise in Virginia and Maryland as runaways from these states fled to Washington. It offered concrete proof to enslaved people and their allies that the federal government might facilitate the destruction of slavery everywhere. And it confirmed the worst fears of their foes about an interloping tyrannical president.

Abraham Lincoln, however, was anxious to preserve his fragile alliance with loyal slaveholders. He had advocated abolition of slavery in Washington in 1849 as a congressman, to no avail. As president, he encouraged the border states to voluntarily end slavery. He chose Delaware as an ideal place to take the lead in late 1861. But it became clear that Union slaveowners could not

FEATURED ARTICLE

When Slaveowners Got Reparationsby Tera W. Hunter, The New York Times

Publications & Articles 82

be so easily persuaded. This reinforced the need to make congressional emancipation conditioned on compensating them, which put abolitionists in a bind.

They welcomed the end of slavery in the capital, but chafed at payments that validated the right to own property in the form of human beings. “If compensation is to be given at all,” the

abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said at the National Anti-Slavery Convention in Philadelphia in 1833, “it should be given to the outraged and guiltless slaves, and not to those who have plundered and abused them.”

Moderate antislavery advocates like Lincoln did not agree. To the contrary, they believed that any manumission plan

had to placate property rights that were buttressed by the Fifth Amendment, which required “just compensation” for government seizure of private assets.

Lincoln appointed a board of commissioners to oversee the process of compensation, headed by the North Carolina abolitionist and New York Times reporter Daniel Reaves

Goodloe. The board reviewed more than 1,000 slaveholders’ petitions to claim more than 3,000 enslaved people, close to the entirety of the dwindling population. Most of the petitioners received the full amount allowed. The largest individual payout was $18,000 for 69 slaves.

Although the District of Columbia Emancipation Act marked the only time the federal government would compensate slaveowners, there is a longer history of slaveowners requesting and receiving indemnification for the loss of their chattel.

Slaveowners felt entitled to and often received compensation from local, colonial and state legislatures, especially in times of crisis — when enslaved women and men ran away, participated in rebellions or were executed for crimes. During the American Revolution, owners asked to be compensated when bondspeople had died while working in lead mines in Virginia, for example, and when they sided with the British and ran away.

The Capitol stands in the background of this 1830 engraving. Library of Congress/Corbis, via VCG, via Getty Images


After the revolution, as Northern states carried out gradual-emancipation plans, compensation was attractive to slaveowners seeking to ease their financial burdens. The 1804 Gradual Abolition Act in New Jersey, for example, did not free anyone immediately. It allowed children of enslaved women to be treated as “apprentices” (slavery by another name) until they reached a certain age and would be freed. The law included a clause that allowed slaveowners to gain compensation by letting their bondspeople go free and then reclaiming them as “bound out labor,” which gave them access to state funds for their troubles.

In a break from tradition in the 1850s, the abolitionist Elihu Burritt organized the National Compensated Emancipation Convention in Cleveland to advocate payments to slaveowners, as well as smaller sums to be paid to the people they had enslaved. Nothing came of his dual proposal, however.

To be sure, the major benefactors of slaveowner reparations within the Atlantic slave system were Europeans. When England abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies, it offered compensation to 46,000 slaveowners at the cost of around $26.2 million.

France went further by penalizing Haiti for the revolution that abolished slavery in its former colony St. Domingue. It levied a huge sum on the island, which crippled it in decades of debt. Former slaves were forced to pay indemnities to former slaveowners in exchange for official recognition as the first black independent nation-state in the Western Hemisphere.

The long and insistent coupling of compensation for slaveowners with emancipation is useful for consideration in current debates about reparations for the descendants of the enslaved. Critics and skeptics are fond of saying that enslaved people should have asked for recompense back then. African-Americans did

precisely that, going back to the colonial era. They petitioned for “freedom dues,” they sued the estates of former masters for their unrequited toil, and they asked for land to restart their lives as free men and women. Relatively few of those efforts were successful.

An overwhelming majority of white people believed that slaveowners, not enslaved African-Americans, deserved recompense for the benevolence of manumission. The only “reward” that was widely supported was colonization: a trip “back to Africa.” The act allocated $100,000 for the voluntary removal of the newly freed people (at 100 dollars per person) to go to Liberia or Haiti, which rarely happened.

Preserving sacred property rights and moving the Negro problem offshore meant that there was no justice for enslaved African-Americans. All of the candidates running for president must support the federal government’s issuing of reparations to African-Americans who were economically affected by slavery. Justice requires this.


Donald Joseph Goines was born on December 15, 1936, in Chicago. Father Joseph and mother Myrtle were hardworking migrants from the South who had managed to open up their own cleaning store. Around 1940 the family, which included older sister Marie, relocated to Detroit and resumed the cleaning business. It was in the Motor City that, ac cording to biographer Eddie B. Allen Jr., Goines started down a dark path. Unlike Iceberg Slim, who in Pimp and elsewhere blamed his mother’s de cision to leave his surrogate father for his descent into delinquency, Goines fell in with the wrong crowd “in spite of the Catholic school education, the respectable mother and father, and the stability that came with being the heir to a family business.” Restless, unruly, yet in credibly sharp, a fifteen-year-old Goines forged a fake birth certificate, adding two years to his actual age, and enlisted in the US Air Force. The country was in the thick of the Korean War.

Though Goines had a relatively short tour, during which he saw no combat, his time in Asia (between Korea and Japan) would forever change his life. He experimented with drugs, developed a penchant for prostitutes, and became hooked on heroin—all while serving as a military police officer. This itinerary of vice was hardly exceptional for the off-base life of a US serviceman. But Goines was in his mid-teens: still a boy in age, he was

exposed to things that hardened him into a man. He returned to Detroit after being honorably discharged at war’s end, in 1956. It did not end up a happy homecoming. “Smack would be his companion for life,” and in order to get his fix, Goines resorted to all manner of criminal activity. He spent the next decade and a half in and out of jail, serving time for charges ranging from bootlegging to attempted larceny. Allen states that had Goines not been locked up during the Detroit riots of 1967, he would have been busy identifying “opportunities to make some personal gain.”

It was in 1969, during a stint in Michigan’s Jackson State Prison, that Goines encountered something that would change his life: Iceberg Slim’s fiction. Goines could relate to Pimp and Trick Baby on a level that was alien to the typical Holloway House reader. He had lived those ex periences and, indeed, was still very much a part of the underworld fraternity about which Slim had written so powerfully in his first two books. This point of identification was important for what would happen next. If black sleaze consisted of race-exploitative tales spun out of whole cloth by just about anyone, black pulp fiction would be the genu-ine article—stories by black people, for black people, specifically about the black urban experience. According to Allen, Goines recognized that “what Beck was doing … was a new kind of hustle. He’d been in the life, made it out of the joint. Now he was simply telling about it.” Goines wanted in on the game, so he submitted a book manuscript to Holloway House and was offered a contract shortly thereafter.

Goines had been out of prison for about a year when his first novel, Dopefiend: The Story of a Black Junkie, appeared in December 1971. The publication of this book would be a turning point in Holloway House’s history. Up to this point, Morriss and Weinstock’s communications cir cuit presumed a white sleaze readership from whom it could draw the necessary

FEATURED ARTICLE

Donald Goines and the Birth of Black Pulp Fictionby Kinohi Nishikawa, CrimeReads


talent to produce most of its fare. That circuit was completely amenable to black sleaze (by the likes of Slim and Robert deCoy), which, in addressing itself to white men, leveraged urban black mascu linity to contain the threat of domestic white femininity. Goines was different: he was not Holloway House’s presumed reader, as he could relate to Pimp from the “inside,” so to speak. By taking a chance on his writing, Morriss and Weinstock opened the door to a new pool of creative talent, one

that emerged out of an urban black readership. This was still cultural appropriation, no doubt, but in this circuit, the white reader faded into the background.

Dopefiend’s very first chapter marks it as distinct from sleaze. The reader is immersed in a space of appalling filth and degradation: the flat of a Detroit dope dealer who lets his strung-out customers use his pad as a “shooting gallery.” “The floor of the apartment,” Goines writes,

“had pools of blood on it, from where addicts had tried to get a hit, but the works had stopped up, and they had pulled the needle out, leaving a flowing trail of blood that dropped down from their arms or necks and settled on the floor.” In this description of setting, Goines does much to suggest the characterological desperation that has produced such filth. Sure enough, the reader finds Jean, a local junkie, hiking up her skirt trying to find a vein that will still be able to take a nee dle. She plunges one into her

groin area and hits a “small abcess [sic],” out of which “a stream of blood, mixed with pus,” begins to pour. But Goines, amazingly, is far from done. This entire disgusting milieu finds its perfect complement in the pusher himself: a portly pervert named Porky who has a penchant for watching addicts suffer. When women in particular find themselves short of money, his “fiendish mind” de vises “abnormal acts for them to entertain him with.” Porky begins touching himself as he fantasizes about the time he forced Jean to have sex with one of his “large German police dogs.” His right-hand woman Smokey, a strung-out addict herself and “one of the dirtiest-hearted black bitches alive,” completes the job as everyone else looks on. This all happens in a matter of seven and a half pages: Goines’s chapter 1.

With milieu established, Dopefiend spins out the tale a young couple, Teddy and Terry, as they descend into Porky’s realm of depravity. At the outset Teddy is already addicted to heroin. For him Terry is but a means to get in Porky’s good graces. Teddy lives with his hardwork ing mother and sister-both single moms trying to keep their family afloat. Terry, on the other hand, comes from a solidly middle-class black family, mirroring Goines’s own background. The Wilsons live in an integrated neighborhood, where “her father kept the lawn beautiful, and her mother kept the inside of the house immaculate.” It is thus Terry’s precipitous fall that propels much of the narrative. Early in her addiction, she thinks to herself, “She wasn’t a dopefiend, she was far too strong for that.” However, as the addiction grows stronger, Terry resorts to increasingly desperate measures to pay for her habit. She steals money from her parents and clothes from the department store at which she works. Then, with fellow junkie Minnie, she defrauds the store-an act for which she is caught and fired. Finally, with Minnie’s encouragement, she turns to prostituting, each trick

Donald Joseph Goines


giving her just enough money to pay for the next hit. Her young life has morphed into the slipperiest of slopes: “Well, I’ve come this far,” Terry thinks before sleeping with her first client, “so there’s no turning back now.”

By that point, Terry has cut out Teddy from her life. The precise mo ment of their break comes when Teddy fails to get an erection after shooting up and forcing himself on Terry. “To cover his shame at not being able to function as a young man should,” Goines writes, “he ex ploded in a blind rage.” His sex drive replaced with a junk drive, Teddy can only muster the energy to rob, steal, and hustle the money he needs to pay for his next hit. His symbolic emasculation comes full circle when he steals his sister’s welfare check, gets thrown in jail for trying to cash it, and has to be rescued by his mother (who asks her daughter to drop the charges). By the time Porky’s henchmen shoot him dead for trying to double-cross him, Teddy is, in a sense, already gone.

Terry’s fate is less certain but far more disturbing. Toward the end, in a fit of desperation, a pregnant Minnie submits to one of Porky’s perverse shows. Reviving his memory of Jean’s submission, Porky has her perform fellatio on his German shepherd. Minnie gets her fix, but at what cost? She hangs herself in her room. Goines seems to spare the reader the grisliest details of that act until Terry discovers the body:

“The sight of Minnie hanging there was shocking enough, but when her eyes turned downward, away from the sight of her friend’s contorted face, they fell on what looked to be a child’s head protruding from between Minnie’s naked legs. The head

of the baby was covered with afterbirth, while only part of its body showed. The rest was still hung up somewhere inside the dead woman’s body.”

As if this doubled “hanging” were not horrifying enough, Goines has Terry fall on the ground—”her hands sliding through the waste that had escaped from Minnie’s body”—gratuitously adding texture to that horror. The shock of this scene, we are led to believe, makes Terry go mad, and she is committed to a hospital. When the Wilsons visit their daughter over three months later, she is diagnosed with “chronic frustrational anxiety due to the traumatic experience of finding her friend dead” and apparently “feeling … deep emotional guilt” over it.

Pimp had a handful of graphic episodes. Mama Black Widow was an exercise in black abjection. But nothing Slim ever wrote could approach the coldness and

cruelty with which Goines approached this particular scene. That Minnie’s violation was to a large extent foreshadowed by what had happened to Jean underscored just how total Goines’s vision of depravity was. The reader was set up to fall right alongside Terry.

How was this not black sleaze? Goines was obviously in the business of writing sensational, even exploitative, literary fare. Yet Dopefiend did not fit with anything else Holloway House had published before. Slim’s use of the first-person voice and the device of the frame narrative en sured that white readers could consume the black underworld from a safe distance. He


wrote from the perspective of the outside looking in. Goines, by contrast, immersed the reader in his fictionalized ghetto, leaving little to no room for imaginative escape. His style was indiffer ent to the outsider’s gaze; it simply sought to make the reader feel with the characters themselves.

Goines’s aesthetic “sensationalism” was, in Hoggart’s terms, “bla tantly and crudely real.” For Haggart, the most striking “sex-and violence novels” were those whose “almost subterranean appearance” came from “an unconscious desire among many readers for a sensa tionalism less artificial than that found in the more widely and pub licly disseminated productions.” In this sense, the most viscerally af fecting pulp was to be distinguished from “the artificiality of so much mass-sensationalism .” The former, like Dopefiend, honed the reader’s response to a degree that only invited the initiated; the latter, like a lot of pinup magazines and sleaze paperbacks, played with conventions with a wink and a nudge. There was an element of mass appeal even in Iceberg Slim that Goines simply removed from his own writing.

Dopefiend, cannily enough, thematizes the difference between what its author sought to write and what was already available in the literary marketplace. In the opening scene, we are introduced to Porky sitting in a “huge armchair.” Master of his domain, the “black and horribly fat man” seems as though he is in a den or some space designated for masculine repose. Porky could be, just for this fleeting moment, one of the dads who would have opened up a copy of Adam or Knight in the privacy of such a space. The narrator then observes, “He set aside the book he had been glancing through, laying it down in such a way that he could glance at the large technicolor pictures of a horse and woman faking an act of copulation .” The shock of this statement is twofold: first, that this is the kind of sleaze Porky would be looking at, and, second, that the narrator would

bother to indicate that the figures in the pictures are “faking” it. Why is this fact relevant to the disgust we feel by the pictures themselves? Because, as we learn only two pages later, Porky has realized the act—of not just play-acting interspecies “copula-tion” but bringing bestiality to life. Such is Goines’s task: if sleaze can only gesture to depravity, he would animate the thing itself.

The final chapter of the novel harks back to this reflexive mo-ment. With Teddy dead and Terry gone mad, we find Porky back in his lair, looking out over the street in summer. Muttering about the heat, Goines notes that Porky is “not really speaking to anyone in the room.” Except he is speaking to the reader. Porky’s flat is just as full of “young addicts” as it was in the beginning, and his predatory instincts identify Ronald and Tess, two teenagers, as new targets. “It was a game of life that he played with all the junkies,” Goines writes, “only the cards were stacked against the junkies, and he was the dealer.” And, like Porky, the reader knows exactly how this game will end for the likes of Ronald and Tess. This point, a meta-reflection on the nature of Goines’s narrative, makes the final two lines all the more devastating: “He didn’t use-no, of all his faults, that was one he didn’t have. Porky was not a dope fiend.” By citing the title of his book as the last word in the book, Goines creates a kind of self-consuming artifact, a book of horrors whose true author is the pusher himself. In place of the bestial ity paperback he has given us Dopefiend.

In one of the earliest pieces to try to bring Goines’s underground reputation to light, Michael Covino, in 1987, described his style as hav ing been “written from ground zero.” By this he meant that Goines’s prose was “the voice of the ghetto itself,” and that his novels consti tuted “a fiction about people who largely don’t read, written in their language.” In one of the earliest academic pieces on Goines, Greg Goode, in 1984, found that Goines’s


books were “poorly written for the most part,” and that his “descriptions, transitions, plots, and narrative voice [were] sandpaper rough.” In reprints of Goines’s paperbacks, Hol loway House attributed the following to Goode from the same essay: “Almost single-handedly, Goines established the conventions and pop ular momentum for a new fiction genre, which could be called ghetto realism.” The first two quotations overlook the artfulness of Goines’s crude writing: for Covino the prose is naturalized as para-literate street talk, while for Goode it is subliterary in a very clumsy way. The third quotation dovetails with the argument of this section. It names a mode of writing, “ghetto realism,” that, rather than appeal to an outsider’s view of the black underworld, enacts an insider’s sensation of heroin fueled despair. Ghetto realism evokes Gaines’s effort to write the thing itself.

The irony is that the third quotation is made up. Kermit E. Camp bell has shown that this line was tacked on to a lightly edited sentence from Goode’s essay to make it seem like he had written it. But it is nowhere to be found in the original publication. Goines’s style may have stripped the veneer of romanticization off depictions of the black underworld, but that did not mean Holloway House would give up playing its tricks. When it came to marketing, the game was always one of masquerade.

When Holloway House brought out Whoreson: The Story of a Ghetto Pimp in February 1972, the book’s design immediately signaled that Goines would be packaged differently from every author who had come before him. The difference lay in sameness: that is, the covers were laid out in identical fashion to Dopefiend’s. On the front, title and subtitle were displayed in big block letters, underneath which appeared the author’s name and a small icon representing the book’s contents (in the case of Whoreson, a prostitute). On the back, a synopsis of the

book’s contents sat above the striking image of Goines himself-an il lustration based on a photograph of the author. Visually, the design framed Dopefiend and Whoreson as two parts of a set. Not a serial (that would come later), but books of the same ilk. From very early on, then, Goines’s legibility as an author was not dependent (as Slim’s had been) on a splashy new illustration for each of his books. All it required was recognition that the black background of his covers—unique in Holloway House’s catalog—indicated a fresh perspective on urban black masculinity.


Olivia Mena is a postdoctoral research associate with the Department of African American Studies whose spring seminar, “Radical Subjects: Race, Deportation and Diaspora,” explores the historical practice of deportation in the United States both past and present.

She describes the course below, focusing on a spring break trip to London to learn about 1950’s political deportees.

We are living in an age of unprecedented migration. It is a historical moment when physical movement across state borders is one of the highest rights and privileges, and state borders are rebuilt and reimagined as walls and fences. This is the broader context in which my students and I started our spring semester committed to thinking about the practice of deportation in the United States in the very broadest sense in our African American studies course “Radical Subjects: Race, Deportation and Diaspora.” What does it mean to banish another human, politically and socially? It is a simple question, but one that has required us to think across the contours of race, nation and belonging in the United States. Aisha Tahir looks at microfilms

of the West Indian Gazette in Lambeth Archives.

In the course, we have read policy documents, court transcripts, FBI files, testimonies and writings about deportation, including materials written by the people targeted, ensnared and expelled from the political community of the United States at different historical moments. Our thinking about these questions did not end at the U.S. national border.

Over the spring break, we set out for London in search of the archives and traveling histories of some of the itinerant and exiled thinkers we were studying. We followed the route of several deportees from the U.S. back to Brixton, a neighborhood in South London where Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James and his compatriot Claudia Jones ended up after their deportations from the United States during the 1950s at the height of McCarthyism.

We spent the week working in the Black Cultural Archives and the Lambeth Archives sifting through old copies of the West Indian Gazette, a newspaper founded and edited by Claudia Jones that is considered to be one of Britain’s first black newspapers.

We studied the newspapers, along with other materials, in our effort to build a better picture of the international network of contributors, the people represented in its pages, and also those who visited Jones’ newsroom that sat above a record shop on Brixton Road, a list which includes well-known U.S. revolutionary figures like Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.,

FEATURED ARTICLE

Notes From The Field: Following The Routes Of U.S. Deportation Through History by Olivia Mena, AAS Newsroom

Aisha Tahir and Frelicia Tucker spent some of their downtime visiting markets and neighborhoods in East London.


W.E.B. Du Bois, and Princeton native Paul Robeson as well as many other anti-colonial leaders from countries around the world.

The pages of the West Indian Gazette offered us a rich map of these diasporic and interconnected political actors and their efforts and solidarities across borders to work for larger political ideals of freedom and self-determination and to connect struggles for racial equality in the U.S. to anticolonial struggles in other parts of the world.

We traced Jones’ political legacies in her ideas and her writing, and also her lasting impact working in the community. She organized and hosted the first Carnival in Britain, beauty pageants and events as a way of bringing people together to confront the larger climate of racial violence directed at the West Indian community living in London.

Frelicia Tucker, a first-year student, noted: “I think the biggest takeaway from our interactions with the primary sources stemming from Claudia Jones’ work was the opportunity to see how far her connections traveled. Her framework of identity and community was not bounded by oceans, gender, class or race.”

“Our work also showed how sometimes the most crucial bits of history are discovered in the places you are not intentionally looking at. We talked to people who were directly affected by the Windrush period and who felt the impact of Jones’s attempt to form a community through the West Indian Gazette,” said Tucker.

We also encountered the transnational confluences in the histories of deportation and reflected on how these histories still reverberate in the present. When the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 effectively shut the borders to

Afro Caribbean migrants coming to the United States, their migration routes shifted to Britain during a historical period of Caribbean migration known as the Windrush generation. More than 50 years later this generation of migrants was in the British headlines again in 2018 when thousands of Commonwealth-born British residents were wrongly targeted for deportation under the U.K. Home Office’s “hostile environment policy” — measures designed under Theresa May’s tenure as Home Secretary to make it so difficult for people without authorization to be in Britain, that they would decide to ‘voluntarily leave’ the country.

“Going to London and getting the chance to stay in Brixton while trying to understand the community and culture Claudia Jones created after being deported by the U.S government was an experience that allowed me to think critically about deportation as more than political or legal,” said sophomore Aisha Tahir.

“From this trip, I learned to think about race, class, immigration and culture, not as separate, but connecting, realities. It has led me to decide on concentrating in African American studies,” said Tahir.

Aisha Tahir and Frelicia Tucker work in Lambeth Archives


Ethiopian scholars and priests shared their knowledge of Ethiopia’s ancient tradition of written literature and bound manuscripts with a large audience at Princeton on March 12.

They were on campus for an event titled “Remorseless Cannibals and Loving Scribes: Samples and Highlights from Princeton University’s Collections of Ethiopian Manuscripts (1500s-1900s),” held in Princeton University Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections. The program drew a diverse audience of students — including students from Ethiopia — Princeton faculty from across the humanities and social sciences, and scholars from up and down the East Coast as well as England and Germany.

“Princeton has the largest and most significant collection of Ethiopian manuscripts in the Americas,” said Wendy Laura Belcher, associate professor of comparative literature and African American studies, who specializes in medieval, early modern and modern African literature.

Belcher said she was excited about the opportunity for the greater Princeton community to meet and learn from these scholars, including Ethiopian priests from Virgin Mary Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church and St. Michael

Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church, both in Los Angeles. “The priests have unique cultural and scholarly knowledge of these texts, based on decades of studying them closely,” Belcher said. “They honor us with their presence and are here to explain to the audience about what these manuscripts are.”

Belcher said there are three facts about Ethiopia that are critical to understanding the significance of these manuscripts; as many mistakenly assume that Christianity in Africa arrived with Europeans.

“First, the Highland Ethiopians converted to Christianity in the fourth century, before most of Europe had even heard of Christ,” Belcher said. “Second, they have been using an African written language for more than 2,000 years, despite the stereotype that Africa is a place without writing. Third, they have been making bound books since the sixth century. This form of Christianity is really ancient, and has nothing to do with Europe.”

About 20 items from the collections were on display, including biblical books in translation, such as the Gospel of John, the apocryphal Enoch and a psalter; as well as indigenous Ethiopian texts, including many saints’ stories (especially those about the Virgin Mary); textual amulets (small scrolls that people carried for protection

FACULTY HIGHLIGHT

Priests, scholars gather to celebrate Princeton’s Ethiopian manuscriptsby Jamie Saxon, Office of Communications


and good luck); and a rare divination text titled “The Cycle of Kings.”

The collection began with donations by Princeton alumnus Robert Garrett, a member of the Class of 1897 who sponsored an expedition to Abyssinia in 1905 and 1906. It has grown over the years to include hundreds of items, including many

manuscripts donated by Bruce Willsie, a 1986 alumnus, who attended the event. Nearly 100 of the manuscripts have been digitized for use by students and scholars worldwide.

Aly Kassam-Remtulla, vice provost for international affairs, welcomed the audience.

“Salam and good afternoon. Thank you for being a part of this celebration,” said Kassam-Remtulla, who told the audience he was born in Kenya and has family in the region and so was especially glad to participate.

Belcher gave an overview of the collection, including a description of one of the most significant texts, “The Miracles of the Virgin Mary.” It includes about 700 folktales about miracles that the Virgin Mary has performed for the faithful. Some of these stories came from Europe but the majority arose in Ethiopia, Belcher said.

Meseret Oldjira, a graduate student in art and archaeology, spoke about the illuminations in the manuscripts. She noted that the texts created “new platforms for Ethiopian

artistic expression,” adding that the intricate colors and techniques offer “a glimpse of the originality of Ethiopian artists.”

One of the priests from Los Angeles, and a cataloguer of Princeton’s collection, Qäsis Melaku Terefe, explained the liturgical context of “The Miracles of the Virgin Mary.” He described how readings from this text are used today during daily morning prayer. He then sang aloud one of the songs from the service.

As a member of the clergy, Melaku Terefe said he sees “the historical and psychological interpretation [of these texts] … as an opportunity to further church unity and dialogue previously divided.”

Michael Kleiner, a scholar and translator of African and Arabic texts at the University of Göttingen, discussed the challenges of translating “The Miracles of the Virgin Mary.” He recounted one of the tales, about a rich Middle Eastern nobleman — the “remorseless cannibal” in the title of the event — who ate only human flesh and devoured 78 souls, including his family, friends and servants, but was saved from hell by Mary due to a drop of water he once charitably gave to a thirsty beggar. Kleiner said: “You should never assume these pious tales can be translated ‘with one eye closed.’ Their simplicity can be deceptive at times — you can miss hidden intricacies of their

Pictured from left: Priests from Los Angeles, Liqä Kahənat Mussie Berhe of St. Michael Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Abba Woldesemait Teklehaymanot of St. Michael Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Qäsis Melaku Terefe of Virgin Mary Ethiopian Orthodox Church, view the selection of manuscripts on display. Photo by Mark Czajkowski

Meseret Oldjira (left), a graduate student in art and archaeology; Michael Kleiner (center), a scholar and translator at the University of Göttingen; and Belcher look at some of the textual amulets on display. Photo by Mark Czajkowski


language and rhetoric.”

Kleiner is a Visiting Stewart Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature under the auspices of the Humanities Council at Princeton this semester. He and Belcher are translating “Kəbrä Nägäśt [The Glory of the Kings],” a retelling of the story of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, often called Ethiopia’s national saga.

“Collecting is a great joy, as is being a lifelong learner,” Willsie said. “But the greatest joy is giving those manuscripts to an institution where they will be preserved and made available to scholars and to the people whose heritage they are a part of.”

Ephraim Isaac gave an overview of the process of cataloging the collection. A scholar and director of the Institute of Semitic Studies, an independent research institution based in Princeton, Isaac was a visiting professor at Princeton from 1980-85 and 1995-2001 and was among the first cataloguers of the University’s Ethiopian collection.

On March 13, the Ethiopian scholars and priests also met to discuss the Princeton Ethiopian Miracles of Mary Project, funded by the Center for Digital Humanities and the Humanities Council. Belcher is principal investigator of the project.

The event was sponsored by Princeton University Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies, and the Humanities Council. It was co-sponsored by Department of African American Studies, University Center for Human Values, Center for the Study of Religion, Program in African Studies, Program in Medieval Studies, Index on Christian Art, Center for Digital Humanities, Department of Comparative Literature and Princeton University Art Museum.

FEATURED ARTICLE

New Directions in Caribbean Historyby Reena N. Goldthree,

The Organization of American Historians

The catastrophic 2017 hurricane season, which included two category 5 storms, briefly thrust the islands of the Caribbean to the forefront of the U.S. news cycle. The deadly hurricanes highlighted the Caribbean’s heightened vulnerability to weather-related disasters and the devastating effects of climate change. The hurricanes also underscored the fact that the history of the Caribbean—and the region’s longstanding ties to the United States—remain obscure to many people living in this country.[1] One week after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, a poll of 2,200 adults on the U.S. mainland revealed that only 54 percent knew that Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens.[2] In the U.S. Virgin Islands, residents linked FEMA’s delayed relief effort following Hurricane Irma to the islands’ political status as an unincorporated territory. As one commentator from St. Thomas remarked, “It’s like they forget that we’re all Americans.”[3]

The lack of historical knowledge about the Caribbean in the United States is not a reflection of the state of the field. Indeed, as I will discuss below, the field of Caribbean history has experienced a remarkable boom over the past two decades. New monographs, articles, and edited volumes abound. Published collections of primary sources have brought together documents from scattered archives for the first time[4]


Ambitious digital initiatives—ranging in scope from single island projects such as the Puerto Rico Syllabus to regional repositories such as the Digital Library of the Caribbean—are bringing Caribbeanist scholarship to new audiences.[5] Yet, the outpouring of innovative and important work produced by historians of the Caribbean remains at the margins of university curricula in the United States. Only a small number of history departments offer Caribbean-focused courses or even identify the Caribbean as a distinct geographic area of specialization. Likewise, in survey courses on U.S. history, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico receive passing attention. As a result, many undergraduate history majors and graduate students, like the broader U.S. public, have little to no exposure to Caribbean history. The cumulative impact of these erasures is felt both inside and outside of the academy, as the failed response to the recent hurricanes makes clear.

In this essay, I sketch out recent trends in the field of Caribbean history. I focus on scholarly works in three broad subfields: disaster history, histories of slavery and emancipation, and labor and migration history. In doing so, I seek to highlight potential points of intersection between U.S. and Caribbean historiographies, while also demonstrating how Caribbeanist perspectives offer novel insights into enduring historical questions about citizenship, colonialism, and capitalism. Historians of the United States have much to gain by engaging with the burgeoning scholarship on the Caribbean. As the oldest site of European colonialism in the Americas, the Caribbean has figured prominently in studies of slavery and revolution. Recent publications build on foundational studies in the field, while also offering deeply-researched case studies for contemporary issues ranging from immigration to weather and climate-related disasters.

Stratification and Empire: New Disaster StudiesObservers in the islands and rimlands of the Greater Caribbean have long documented the ruinous effects of earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, and other calamities. Historians of the Caribbean, however, have only recently begun to place disasters at the center of their analyses. In a spate of new works—mostly focused on the colonial era—scholars investigate the political, social, and economic consequences of disasters. Central to this literature is an attention to how disasters both restructure the relationships among humans and transform human understandings of the natural world. Studying the impact of disasters before the advent of the modern welfare state, scholars trace how relief and reconstruction efforts mobilized the labor of local communities even as colonists sought assistance from the state. The destruction wrought by disasters, as these recent studies demonstrate, often amplified and entrenched the deep asymmetries of power within colonial Caribbean societies, fueling inequalities that persisted well beyond the recovery period.[6]

Hurricanes loom large in the growing historiography of Caribbean disasters. Recent scholarship by Stuart Schwartz, Sherry Johnson, and Matthew Mulcahy details how hurricanes shaped the processes of European conquest and colonization in the Caribbean. While little is known about how indigenous societies weathered these storms, historians have shown how major tempests frequently disrupted the network of maritime travel and trade that sustained early European settlement in the Caribbean, wrecking entire fleets and forcing sailors to restrict or reroute their movements. Under Spain’s flota system, for example, the annual sailing of ships from Havana to the Iberian


Peninsula was scheduled to avoid the peak of hurricane season.[7] A series of major hurricanes struck the Leeward Islands and Barbados during the seventeenth century, nearly destroying the first English settlements in the region. The deadly tempests, as Mulcahy explains, “tested colonists’ faith that they could dominate and transform American nature.” [8] Starting in the mid-eighteenth century, El Niño and La Niña cycles produced a fifty-year period of severe drought and hurricane activity in the Caribbean. The climate-induced disasters of this era contributed to the tumult of the Age of Revolution, highlighting the important links between environmental and political crises.[9] Scholarly accounts of environmental and human-made disasters in the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Caribbean expose the limits of political inclusion in empires after slavery’s end.[10]

Rethinking Mobility: Slavery and EmancipationDeepening the rich literature on slavery in the Caribbean, a cluster of studies directs our attention to slavery’s spatial logics, mapping the ways in which chattel slavery was maintained through the violent control of mobility and space. Importantly, this new work “decouples the strong association between mobility and freedom” in slavery studies.[11] Instead, it foregrounds how mobility could facilitate enslavement just as it could offer a means to escape. The millions of kidnapped Africans who survived the Atlantic crossing experienced myriad forms of what Rashauna Johnson describes as “compulsory mobility”—transportation from urban slave markets to rural plantations, labor in itinerant jobbing gangs, separation from loved ones through resale, and forced exile during times for war and revolution.[12] While local authorities and slave holders feared clandestine movement by the enslaved, they also relied

on bondspeople’s peripatetic labor to maintain the rhythms of daily life. Thus, the ability to initiate, direct, and control the movement of enslaved persons on land and at sea was central to the exercise of power in slave societies.

Port cities—often depicted as spaces of relative freedom because of the constant circulation of people and goods—featured their own technologies of control and surveillance. The urban environment did not shield the enslaved from the forms of racialized and gendered terror most often associated with plantation slavery. Innovative studies of urban bondage in the Greater Caribbean make this point abundantly clear. Alongside the markets, warehouses, and wharves of eighteenth-century Bridgetown, colonists in Barbados erected whipping posts, stocks, gallows, and a holding prison referred to as “the Cage” to subjugate local bondspeople. “Punishments on enslaved bodies included public displays of colonial power,” Marisa Fuentes observes, “and Bridgetown contained several spaces that invoked fear in the absence of the spatial confinement of the plantation complex.”[13] In early-nineteenth-century New Orleans, thousands of refugees of African descent who had fled revolutionary Saint-Domingue found themselves on the city’s auction blocks, experiencing (re)enslavement rather than freedom in the cosmopolitan metropolis.[14] Situating urban spaces at the center of our geographies of Caribbean slavery invites new questions about the subaltern connections that linked Santiago de Cuba and New Orleans; Bridgetown and Charleston; and Cap-Français and Philadelphia.[15]

Careful study of slavery’s spatial logics also promises to enrich the vast and sophisticated historiography of slave resistance in the Caribbean. In Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba, Aisha Finch reconstructs the clandestine networks that free and enslaved black people forged in the province of Matanzas during the 1840s. As sugar production boomed in nineteenth-


century Cuba, plantations increasingly existed in close proximity to one another, presenting heightened opportunities for both sanctioned and illicit movement between estates by the enslaved. Furthermore, owners of sugar and coffee plantations relied on male slaves to work as coachmen, muleteers, and in other positions that necessitated movement beyond the plantation. Seizing opportunities to interact with other black Cubans, enslaved women and men exchanged information at religious gatherings, Sunday markets, rural taverns, and in the slave barracks, ultimately creating “insurgent geographies” in the sugar-producing heartland of Cuba. [16]

Multimedia initiatives further build upon and enrich the spatial turn in Caribbean slavery studies. Digital mapping and data visualization tools not only enable scholars to present historical research in novel ways, but also can address silences in the archival record. Take, for example, Vincent Brown’s multimedia project Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative[17] Examining the largest slave uprising in the eighteenth-century British West Indies—known as “Tacky’s Rebellion” or “Tacky’s Revolt” after one of the enslaved leaders—the project uses an interactive animated map and timeline to trace the rebels’ movements

across Jamaica and the counterinsurgency military campaign that brutally suppressed it. Given the absence of written sources produced by the enslaved, Slave Revolt in Jamaica foregrounds the conflict’s spatial dimensions as a lens into the rebels’ mobilization strategies, tactics, and aims. The project’s interface allows users to explore how enslaved rebels and their adversaries navigated Jamaica’s distinctive landscape, while

also raising crucial questions about how various groups of combatants conceptualized space and their relationship to the natural world. Other groundbreaking multimedia projects, such as Digital Aponte and A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789, highlight rich yet under-utilized sources for the study of Caribbean slave societies, just as the recently launched La Gazette Royale promises to expand historians’ discussion of newly-independent Haiti[18] The Caribbean age of emancipation—stretching from the 1790s to the 1880s—has garnered renewed attention as well. In the seven decades since Trinidadian intellectuals C.L.R. James and Eric Williams published their

pathbreaking studies of the destruction of slavery in the Caribbean, scholars have carefully scrutinized the economic imperatives, legal regimes, ideological currents, military contests, and political debates that spurred the end of chattel


bondage.[19] An emerging body of scholarship on emancipation in the circum-Caribbean world raises exciting new questions. This work shifts our attention from liberal discourses of liberty and citizenship to the embodied practices and solidarities of the newly emancipated, while also attending to the wave of post-emancipation restrictions sought by the planter class.[20] As Mimi Sheller explains in Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom, “popular practices of embodied resistance” included public conflicts over space, wages, and religious practice as well as the renegotiation of intimacy and gender roles.[21] Calling on scholars to “revisit histories of emancipation in relation to more recent understandings of sexual citizenship and the sexual state,” Sheller argues that the public and private realms were tightly enmeshed in freedpeople’s post-emancipation struggles to secure equality.[22] Along with their attention to popular politics, several recent accounts of emancipation and its aftermath in the Caribbean are also translocal in scope, excavating the connections that united freedpeople across national and imperial boundaries.[23]

Inter-imperial Histories of Labor and MigrationIn the decades following emancipation, hundreds of thousands of Afro-Caribbeans migrated within and beyond the region, using geographic mobility as a strategy in a hard-fought battle for social mobility. During roughly the same era, indentured laborers from Asia traveled to the Caribbean on multi-year contracts, with over 530,000 Indian and 160,000 Chinese immigrants arriving in the region by 1917.[24] Fresh waves of European sojourners headed to the islands as well. Working at the intersection of labor history and migration studies, Caribbeanist scholars have placed migrants at the center of new accounts of empire, racial formation, and

capitalist expansion. Moving across scales of analysis—tracking migration from local, regional, imperial, and global perspectives—recent works illuminate how mobile laboring people forged ties across geopolitical boundaries and negotiated European and U.S. imperialism from the bottom up.

Afro-Caribbean sojourners created a transnational world that historian Lara Putnam describes as the “circum-Caribbean migratory sphere.”[25] Labor-market conditions as well as islanders’ personal ties shaped migratory circuits. “Transnational networks of kith and kin determined which opportunities would-be migrants heard about, what resources they could mobilize to get there, and who they could fall back on if plans went awry,” Putnam notes.[26] Major receiving societies included the rimlands of Central America, the sugar zones of the Dominican Republic and Cuba, the southern Caribbean island of Trinidad, and Venezuela. U.S. expansionism in the Greater Caribbean between the 1890s and the 1940s would draw black islanders to Panama to build a transoceanic canal, to agricultural enclaves controlled by U.S corporations, and to new U.S. military bases in the region. Significantly, work sites, as recent studies detail, provided many Afro-Caribbeans with their first exposure to U.S. empire.[27]

Migrants encountered myriad difficulties while overseas. Labor exploitation, physical abuse, racism, linguistic barriers, and anti-immigrant discrimination compounded the quotidian challenges of living in a new society. While documenting these indignities, new monographs recover migrants’ efforts to exert control over working conditions and to build community. Through mutual aid societies, masonic lodges, black newspapers, scouting groups, and religious organizations, British West Indians created networks of support that linked relatives in the islands to loved ones in receiving societies across the Americas.[28]


Haitian migrant laborers in Cuba during the first four decades of the twentieth century sought to improve their condition by combining wages from work on sugar plantations and coffee farms, building personal relationships with managers and landowners, participating in labor unions, and reporting abuses to local Haitian consuls. Leisure activities such as gambling, dancing, and religious practice offered important opportunities for community formation among Haitian migrants, while also allowing Haitian men and women to forge ties with Cubans and British Caribbeans who also lived in the sugar zones.[29]

By studying the transnational world created by Caribbean migrants, historians have begun to craft new narratives about the origins of black internationalism and anti-colonial nationalism in the interwar era. Complementing previous studies of Caribbean radicals in the United States and Europe, recent accounts illuminate political organizing by Caribbean migrants in the sugar zones in eastern Cuba, banana enclaves in Central America, the Panama Canal Zone, and other circum-Caribbean migrant hubs. As these studies reveal, black working peoples in outposts far from Harlem, London, and Paris developed their own sophisticated critiques of white supremacy, imperialism, and economic inequality. Their internationalism fueled the global spread of organizations like the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), laid the foundation for religious movements like Rastarfari, filled the ranks of local Communist cells, and inspired militant strikes and labor protests across the Greater Caribbean.[30] While Afro-Caribbeans would confront a host of new restrictions on their mobility by the end of the 1920s—as the United States, Cuba, and countries in Central and South America passed new immigration laws and forcibly repatriated migrants—their internationalist politics would continue to reverberate in the Caribbean for many decades.[31]

ConclusionIn his 1963 appendix to The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James declared: “The Caribbean is now an American sea.”[32] James was not the first writer to situate the waters and peoples of the Caribbean within the imperial orbit of the United States. Since the nineteenth century, slaveholders in the U.S. South had imagined the Caribbean Sea as part of an “American Mediterranean,” a connection that grew only stronger as the twentieth century dawned.[33] James’s declaration about the role of the United States in the Caribbean, however, occurred at the precise moment when the Cuban Revolution, decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean, and pro-democracy struggles in the Dominican Republic had inspired militant critiques of U.S. imperialism and demands for sovereignty and self-determination in the region. James’s insight about the shifting landscape of power highlighted both the hopes and uncertainties of an era of tremendous socio-political ferment. His declaration also offered an urgent reminder about the entwined histories of the Caribbean and the United States. Recent scholarship richly illuminates these moments of exchange between the islands and the United States, while also documenting the local and regional currents that have forged distinctive societies in the Caribbean. These new narratives have much to teach us about the Caribbean past, present, and future.

Notes[1]On the general dismissal of Caribbean history as a field of study, see Lillian Guerra, “Why Caribbean History Matters,” Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, March 2014, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/march-2014/why-caribbean-history-matters.

[2]Kyle Dropp and Brendan Nyhan, “Nearly Half of Americans Don’t Know Puerto Ricans Are Fellow Citizens,” New York Times, Sept. 26, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/upshot/nearly-half-of-americans-dont-know-people-in-puerto-ricoans-are-fellow-citizens.html.

[3]Jim Wyss, “Hard-hit Virgin Islands residents feel like ‘bastard step-children’ of U.S. after Irma,” Miami Herald, Sept. 12, 2017, http://www.miamiherald.com/news/weather/hurricane/article172841811.html.

[4]For examples, see Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Elizabeth S. Manley, and April J. Mayes, eds., Cien años de feminismos dominicanos: una colección de documentos y escrituras clave en la formación y evolución del pensamiento y el


movimiento feminista en la República Dominicana, 1865–1965 (2016); The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, ed. Robert A. Hill, vol. 11, The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920 (2011); The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, ed. Robert A. Hill, vol. 12, The Caribbean Diaspora, 1920–1921 (2014); and The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, ed. Robert A. Hill, vol. 13, The Caribbean Diaspora, 1921–1922 (2016).

[5]“Puerto Rico Syllabus,” https://puertoricosyllabus.com/; “Digital Library of the Caribbean,” dLOC, http://www.dloc.com/; See also Yarimar Bonilla and Max Hantel, “Visualizing Sovereignty,” Vimeo video, https://vimeo.com/169690419; Yarimar Bonilla and Max Hantel, “Visualizing Sovereignty: Cartographic Queries for the Digital Age,” sx archipelagos, 1 (no. 1, 2016).

[6]Christopher M. Church, Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean (2017).

[7]Stuart B. Schwartz, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina (2015), 38–39.

[8]Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 (2006), 28.

[9]Sherry Johnson, Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (2011).

[10]Church, Paradise Destroyed.

[11]Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (2016), 8.

[12]Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis, 3

[13]Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016), 38.

[14]Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis, 24–54.

[15]See, for example, Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (2014); and Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (2012).

[16]Aisha K. Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841–1844 (2015), 51–78.

[17]Vincent Brown, “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative,” http://revolt.axismaps.com. See also Vincent Brown, “Mapping a Slave Revolt: Visualizing Spatial History through the Archives of Slavery,” Social Text, 33 (Dec. 2015), 134–41; and Vincent Brown, “Narrative Interface for New Media History: Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761,” American Historical Review, 121, (Feb. 2016), 176–86.

[18]See “Digital Aponte,” NYU, http://aponte.hosting.nyu.edu/; “A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789,” UMD, https://colonyincrisis.lib.umd.edu and Marlene Daut, La Gazette Royale: A Journey Through Haiti’s Early Print Culture, http://lagazetteroyale.com/.

[19]C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938); Eric Eustace Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944).

[20]For example, see Natasha Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (2015); and Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (2012).

[21]Sheller, Citizenship from Below, 13.

[22]Ibid., 20.

[23]For example, see Anne Eller, We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom (2016); and Matthew J. Smith, Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica after Emancipation (2014).

[24]Walton Look Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies, 1806-1995: A Documentary History (1998), 4–7.

[25]Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (2013), 21–48.

[26]Putnam, Radical Moves, 22.

[27]For example, see Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (2009), 123–58; Jason M. Colby, The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America (2011), 79–148; Olive Senior, Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal (2014); Harvey Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (2007); and Jana Lipman, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution (2008). On U.S. capitalist expansion in the Caribbean during this era, see Peter Hudson, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (2017).

[28]Putnam, Radical Moves.

[29]Matthew Casey, Empire’s Guestworkers: Haitian Migrants in Cuba during the Age of U.S. Occupation (2017).

[30]For example, see Carla Burnett, “‘Unity is Strength’: Labor, Race, Garveyism, and the 1920 Panama Canal Strike,” Global South, 6 (Fall 2012), 39–64; Philip A. Howard, Black Labor, White Sugar: Caribbean Braceros and Their Struggle for Power in the Cuban Sugar Industry (2015), 153–78; and Frances Peace Sullivan, “‘Forging Ahead’ in Banes, Cuba: Garveyism in a United Fruit Company Town,” New West Indian Guide, 88 (Jan. 2014), 231–61; Clinton A. Hutton, Michael A. Barnett, Daive A. Dunkley, and Jahlani Niaah, eds., Leonard Percival Howell and the Genesis of Rastafari (2015); Margaret Stevens, Red International and Black Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919–1939 (2017); and Monique A. Bedasse, Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the Age of Decolonization (2017).;

[31]For an overview of immigration restrictions in the Americas during the 1920s and 1930s, see Putnam, Radical Moves, 82–122.

[32]C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1989), 409.

[33]Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (2008), 12–16. See also Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (2016).


The African-American studies professor sits down with The Nation to discuss books, Beyoncé, and the radical potential of the academy.

Nawal Arjini: OK, so I have to ask you: Beyoncé opened her 2018 Coachella performance with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and in this year’s accompanying album, there’s a track where her daughter sings the song to her—just as your son did, in the scene that opens May We Forever Stand. The setting of the concert, a pep rally in an imaginary black university, also has a lot to do with what you write about in the book, which came out a month before Coachella. What did you make of the performance?

Imani Perry: It reminded me of the culture of pageants in the early 20th century in black communities—historical pageants, which told the story of black life from precolonial Africa to the present, which were such an important part of black institutional and cultural life pre-desegregation. Hundreds of people performed in

them, with elaborate outfits and elaborate composition, and a whole body of brilliant dramaturges, many of whom were black women. It’s a really wonderful remix of history: Beyoncé created a pageant for the 21st century that recounted the institutional practices and spaces where pageants used to exist. She gave the public an encapsulated black cultural history.

There is a powerful symbolism to having her daughter learn the song; that was a huge part of [pageant culture], the socialization of children to give them a sense of themselves that was far beyond and far greater than the inequality and degradation they experienced in everyday life. It was beautiful. But it’s also important to think about the crisis of this moment that makes the desire to return to those types of practices feel

so urgent and resonate so deeply.

NA: How are your three books connected, to this moment or to each other?

IP: Lorraine Hansberry is a proto-exemplar of the kind of liberation feminism I’m talking about in Vexy Thing, but she was also a product of the kind of black institutional life I’m talking about in May We Forever Stand. So she’s at the center of the two other more academic projects.

NA: That was striking—you talk about Looking for Lorraine as a “third-person memoir,” you open May We Forever

Stand with a personal anecdote, and in Vexy Thing you often write in the first person. How do you think about that kind of subjectivity?

IP: Academic training often encourages mythmaking around objectivity, a pretense that your work is not grounded in ideology

FACULTY HIGHLIGHT

Imani Perry’s Liberation Feminismby Nawal Arjini, The Nation


or experience. That’s absolutely not true. In order to develop the passion to live with a project for years, it has to resonate with you personally. The imperative is rigor, so your opinions don’t overwhelm the serious or critical work. I have never felt a need to pretend that I don’t have a life and commitments that shape the work. I don’t feel self-conscious about it—it’s not as though I sacrificed rigor.

NA: There are so many constraints within the academy on what you can publish and what you can teach. How do you navigate those boundaries?

IP: It helped to make the transition to African-American studies, which draws on multiple disciplines, because the traditional disciplines don’t fully get to the experiences of marginalized people anyway. When you pursue African-American studies, you have to have flexibility in terms of methodology, and a willingness to be expansive and experimental.

I talked to [law professor] Derrick Bell when I first started teaching at [Rutgers University] Law School. I said, “Well, I want to do all this unconventional stuff, and you do all this unconventional stuff—how do I navigate this?” He told me, “Write a lot. Whatever you write will be highly objectionable to a lot of people, but if you write enough of it, they probably can’t derail your career.”

NA: Each chapter of Vexy Thing comes at the question of gender and liberation from a totally different standpoint. What prompted the project, and how did you choose your methods?

IP: I wanted to produce a work of feminist theory, or as I call it, liberation feminism, that would speak to the particular conditions of neoliberal capitalism and the hypermedia age—

this eruption of digital media, where things that look like democratic spaces are at the same time corporate platforms.

I saw so many uses of the term “patriarchy” that didn’t actually apprehend the structure of domination. Patriarchy is a project that coincided with the transatlantic slave trade and the age of conquest. It’s not just attitudes. It’s legal relations between human beings, which lead to very different encounters with violence and suffering. The book begins with where patriarchy comes from, and then morphs into the current landscape, in which conditions are different but where that foundational structure is still present. Feminism is ultimately a way of reading the world with an eye towards reducing or eliminating unjust forms of domination, violence, and exploitation.

NA: A lot of those concepts are used much more often and familiarly when people talk about racial domination than with the patriarchy—people have been studying the relationship between race and gender and domination for a very long time, but in the language of activists and mainstream discourse, do you feel that there’s a gap that you were filling?

IP: I always feel two ways about things! It’s good for academic work to be applicable to the work of organizing. All these academic concepts have moved into the mainstream, sometimes in very useful ways—but also in ways that are very difficult for organizers. Organizing is a collective, transformative process. Academics engage, more than anything, in critique. If you begin from the position of critique, it’s difficult to bring people into organizing, to be about the process of transformation, and to work with other human beings.

NA: I was here a couple of months ago, when [the poet, theorist, and critic] Fred Moten gave a lecture


to a packed room. There’s such interest among students, especially academically inclined students, toward critiques like his of the university’s potential to accommodate black students, people of color, leftists of color. What’s your response to that?

IP: On the one hand, universities are of the society, so they entail all the structures of inequality that we’d see in any other institution. There’s a particularly pernicious element in that they are the spaces in which knowledge is produced. Being at the site of knowledge production, there’s a lot of potential danger. People are trained to think in ways that legitimize domination.

On the other hand, the university is one of the rare sites where there’s even the prospect of having explicitly Marxian or leftist or feminist politics within the site of employment. Lots of places become sites of struggle, but being a faculty member at a university is one of the rare places where you can have your work attached to your politics—which is not to suggest that there’s not backlash, and not to suggest that universities aren’t complicit in all kinds of forms of domination, whether it’s of support staff, or adjunct labor, or academic exploitation.

NA: Universities aren’t Marxist themselves, but they give room for people like you.

IP: My friends who are red-diaper babies, or movement babies—depending on which part of the struggle you come from—they’re either in academia or they’re in the nonprofit world. Both places are problematic in their own way, but that’s where they’ve gone, because those are places where you can at least hold onto your ideas.

NA: Would you talk about the relationship between working in the department you work in—a top-ranked African-American studies department—and being in Princeton, as both a university and a town?

IP: It’s an extraordinary department, and Princeton as a university has treated me very well. I love that we increased the number of first-generation and Pell Grant–eligible students in the student body. I feel the difference; it makes the classrooms much more rigorous spaces. It changes the classroom dynamic, the questions that emerge, the ways in which students are pushed to think.

People in our department live in Princeton, and seem to be perfectly comfortable. For me, it’s not particularly appealing. It’s so important for me to live in close proximity to a substantial black community, and places that are racially and class- and immigration-status diverse.

NA: So living in Philly is good for your academic work?

IP: Oh yes. It’s very good for my personal life and makes a difference in my work. I walk past beauty-supply stores and check-cashing places and Ross Dress for Less and Walmart, and that helps me think. It’s useful for making good work, having both the everyday and the academic.

NA: Do you see changes in the students who come to your department? In terms of who they are, or what they want out of their education?

IP: People assume that first-generation students, or students from poor and working-class backgrounds, are the most concerned with getting a job or getting out [of their situations], and I find the opposite. In fact they’re more likely to approach the classroom with a deep commitment to asking serious intellectual


questions about ideas and social relations. Obviously, there are kids across the spectrum who have that, but it’s a higher proportion of the kids who are less privileged. It elevates the level of conversation in classes; there’s less of a taking “living the life of the mind” for granted. It’s good for all of us.

I don’t yet think that we have figured out how to make the university a place that is equally caring to all students, and that seems to be the next stage of aspiration that we have to pursue. The student body is shifting. How should we shift to accommodate the student body?

NA: When I was in college, consciously or not, we would always go to professors of color, women of color, to ask for help—they were the people who shouldered that burden of handling the shift in the student body.

IP: I feel conflicted about that narrative, and I heard it a lot: “You’ll be expected to work twice as hard.” That’s true, but I do it because that’s my calling. I do it because those are my politics. I want to pour into students what was poured into me: care about me as a whole human being. I do think the institutions should find a way to acknowledge that additional labor, but I don’t resent it. Maybe some people do, but for me, it is part of why I’m here. Also we owe a lot of our position to students. It’s not because we aren’t excellent, but student demands have made universities open their doors to women faculty, to faculty of color, and as a consequence we have mutual responsibility. I feel extreme gratitude towards students who have decided that the work that I have devoted my life to is meaningful for them.

FACULTY HIGHLIGHT

El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale by Chika O. Okeke-Agulu, Ofodunka

El Anatsui’s survey exhibition “Triumphant Scale” at Haus der Kunst – the first ever in Europe – is the most comprehensive and detailed presentation of his oeuvre thus far. Occupying the entire East Wing, the exhibition comprises key works from five decades of the artist’s career. At the core of the exhibition, which focuses on the triumphant and monumental nature of El Anatsui’s groundbreaking oeuvre, are the bottle-cap works from the last two decades, with their majestic, imposing presence and dazzling colors. The exhibition also presents the lesser-known wood sculptures and wall reliefs from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, ceramic sculptures from the 1970s, as well as drawings, prints, and sketchbooks.

The exhibition reveals the artist’s tireless preoccupation with the question of how a contemporary sculptural concept can be developed from the rich plastic innovations of classical and traditional African art. El Anatsui has persistently worked to transform the formal and sculptural possibilities of African sculptural idioms and, over fifty years, he has repeatedly revised and reinvented his material and compositional techniques to astonishing effect – from the early smaller wooden reliefs with their incised markings and broken ceramic forms, to the monumental outdoor cement sculptures, and, more recently, the vast and spectacular metal wall and floor works, which blur the boundaries between sculpture, painting and assemblage. In El


Anatsui’s hands, light, form, color, porousness and corporeality merge into awe-inspiring and triumphant works of art.

El Anatsui’s Broken Pot series of the 1970s is characterized by the use of negative space and fragmentation as a structuring principle, and as metaphoric statement about life, history and memory. The wood works from the following decade create intimacy less by their relatively small scale than by their incised markings, inspired by the Adinkra signs of the Akan and Uli motifs of the Igbo, or indigenous West African writing systems, such as Nsibidi, Bamum and Vai scripts. The wood sculptures also have distinctive gestural markings made with a chain saw. The metal works, produced since 2000, dwarf the viewer with their magnificence and imposing scale, while captivating at close range with their jewel-like detail.

As El Anatsui commented in 2003, the use of found materials isof fundamental importance: “I experimented with many materials. I also work with material that has experienced a lot of touch and use by people... and these types of materials and works are more charged than materials or pieces that I have worked with machines. Art grows out of any specific situation, and I think artists should work better with what their environment currently provides.” The weathered surfaces of the transformed

objects seem initially like a meditation on transience but, as Okwui Enwezor observes, El Anatsui intrinsically expands the possibilities of sculpture by responding to every material “as if he just discovered it in the flow of time and history.”

El Anatsui generates meaning out of his material and technical process. For example, the bottle caps come from hard liquors introduced by Europeans, as currency – and thus a means of

subjugation – during the era of transatlantic slavery and colonialisation. The process of cutting, flattening, squeezing, twisting, folding and joining of thousands of these bottle caps, together with copper wire that weave together fabricated sections into a single work, speaks to the making of human communities out of connected individual subjectivities

Importantly, El Anatsui’s work is shaped by the interplay between the philosophical and aesthetic

discourses of art and literature in post-colonial Africa. In 1962, the historic “Conference of African Writers of English Expression” at the Makerere College (now Makerere University) in Kampala, Uganda focused on the question of language and the new African literature. The participants included militant nationalists who rejected European languages as a medium for African literature and internationalists who considered global literary traditions an inspiration. Despite their differences,

ELANATSUI,“StressedWorld,”2011(aluminumandcopperwire,174x234inches/442x594.4cm).© El Anatsui. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York


it became clear that Western literary traditions could not be passively accepted as the only model for new African literature. Similarly, the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, Ibadan, convened leading artists, writers from the continent committed to the production and discussion of postcolonial modernist work in Africa. Besides writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Es’kia Mphahlele and Christopher Okigbo (who were at Makerere), Mbari membership included the artists Demas Nwoko and Ibrahim El Salahi, but also Vincent Kofi who was El Anatsui’s mentor, and Uche Okeke who helped attract him to Nsukka in 1975.

Site-specific works at Haus der KunstFascinated by the museum’s monumental architecture, El Anatsui has created three works especially for this exhibition: two indoor works, “Logoligi Logarithm” and “Rising Sea”, and “Second Wave” on the building’s façade. “Logoligi Logarithm”, designed for the vast centre hall of the East Wing, consists of approximately 65 individual parts made of aluminum and copper wire, forming a walkable labyrinth. Within this concourse, manifold perspectives arise, as well as countless axes and plays of light and shadow is dedicated to the Ghanaian poet Atukwei Okai (1941-2018). “Rising Sea” is an eight-meter tall white wall and floor piece, which despite its dazzling beauty is a commentary on the pressing issue of global warming and coming disasters.

“Second Wave” the approx. 110m installation on the outer façade of Haus der Kunst, incorporates several thousand offset printing plates, sourced from a local Munich printing house where a large daily newspaper is produced, as well as from a printer in Bolzano, which produces art books. The printing plates have been folded, pressed, layered, riveted, bent, curved and welded into 22 panels, each ten meters high and four

meters wide, connected by bridging elements. “Second Wave” combines a strong physicality with structural indeterminacy. Okwui Enwezor comments that this installation conjures the popular African rule of life that “no condition is permanent.”

An exhibition by Haus der Kunst, Munich. Curated by Okwui Enwezor, former Director of Haus der Kunst and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Professor of Art History at the Department of Art and Archeology, Princeton University, assisted by Haus der Kunst curator Damian Lentini.

The exhibition is made possible thanks to major funding by the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, the significant support of an anonymous donor, and the generous contributions of Gesellschaft der Freunde Haus der Kunst e.V., Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, Reni Folawiyo, Bolaji Balogun, Yvonne Fasinro and Kavita Chellaram.

“El Anatsui. Triumphant Scale” travels to the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (October 1, 2019 to February 2, 2020); the Museum of Fine Arts, Berne (March 13 to June 21, 2020); and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (July 17 to November 1, 2020). Prestel will publish an exhibition catalog of 320 pages, with extensive illustrations from the artist’s archive, authored by Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu. Biography

BiographyAfter training in sculpture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Accra from 1965–1969, El Anatsui (*1944, Anyako, Ghana) taught at the Specialist Training College in Winneba, Ghana. In 1975, he moved to Nigeria where he taught sculpture and design for four decades at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, becoming an emeritus professor in 2016.


A member of the Aka Circle of Exhibiting Artists and a leading figure of the Nsukka School, El Anatsui has exhibited in five continents over the last 50 years. His numerous solo exhibitions include “Wooden Wall Plaques”, Asele Art Gallery, Nsukka, Nigeria (1976); “Broken Pots: Sculpture by El Anatsui,” Institute of African Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka (1979); “Venovize: Ceramic Sculpture by El Anatsui”, Faculty of Art and Design Gallery, Cornwall College, Redruth (1987); Gawu, Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, Wales (2003); “Gli”, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston (2010); “A Fateful Journey”, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, and The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama (2010); “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui,” Akron Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Des Moines Art Center, Bass Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2012-2015) and many other exhibitions in museums, galleries and foundations.

El Anatsui has participated in major group exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1990 and 2007); the 5th Biennale in Havana (1994); the 1st Johannesburg Biennale (1995); and the biennials of Dakar (2000), Liverpool (2002), Gwangju (2004) and Marrakesh (2016); as well as the 9th Sculpture Biennial of Osaka (1998) and La Triennale, Paris (2012).

Public commissions include Broken Bridge for La Triennale, Paris (Museé Galiera) 2012; Broken Bridge II, 2012-2013, presented by Friends of the High Line, New York; and Tsiatsia - Searching for Connection, 2013 on the façade of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Three Angles is currently installed on the façade of the Carnegie Museum for the 2018 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh.

El Anatsui has received many prestigious awards, including the Praemium Imperiale (2017); the Golden Lion for Life Work at the Venice Biennale (2015); the Audience Award at the 7th Triennale

of Small Sculpture in Fellbach; and the Kansai Telecasting Prize at the Osaka Triennale (1995). He has received honorary doctorates from Harvard University and the University of Cape Town (2016) and he was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014) and the Royal Academy of Art (2013). He won the Prince Claus Award (2009) and the 30th Anniversary Award from the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (2009), among others.

El Anatsui’s work is in major public collections in Africa, Asia, North America and Europe, including the Asele Institute (Nimo); the African Studies Gallery of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (Nsukka); The British Museum (London); The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.); the Centre Pompidou (Paris); the Los Angeles County Museum (Los Angeles); the Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines); the De Young Museum (San Francisco); the Museum Kunstpalast (Dusseldorf); the Setagaya Museum (Tokyo); the National Gallery of Modern Art (Lagos); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto); the Tate (London); the Nelson-Atkins Museum (Kansas City); the Iwalewahaus, University of Bayreuth (Bayreuth); the Jordan National Museum (Amman); the Leeum Samsung Museum (Seoul); the Brooklyn Museum (New York); The Broad (Los Angeles); the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indianapolis); the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston); the Guggenheim Museum (Abu Dhabi) and the Saint Louis Art Museum (Saint Louis).

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